Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In an essay in the Washington Post, Danielle Allen invokes Hannah Arendt to suggest that we must speak out about the danger Donald Trump poses to constitutional democracy. “Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country. To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as ‘just doing their job,’ yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine. Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called ‘Men in Dark Times.’ In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler’s rise was a terrible thing but chose ‘internal exile,’ or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness.” Allen knows that Trump is not the same as Hitler. Hitler had written an ideological and racist book calling for the rise of an Aryan nation and the expulsion and murder of the Jews; Trump, on the other hand, is seemingly non-ideological. But Allen does rightly see that Trump is dangerous insofar as he seems to have no respect for limits to his power, whether those limits are civil or constitutional. “Donald Trump has no respect for the basic rights that are the foundation of constitutional democracy, nor for the requirements of decency necessary to sustain democratic citizenship. Nor can any democracy survive without an expectation that the people require reasonable arguments that bring the truth to light, and Trump has nothing but contempt for our intelligence.” As first Chris Christie and now Maine Governor Paul LePage endorse Trump, it is clear that Trump is breaking down the resistance of the Republican establishment. While evangelical leaders are on record saying they will not support Trump if he is the nominee, establishment Republicans seem prepared to accept Trump as their standard-bearer.

Allen’s essay was met with a barrage of ugliness on social media. In an update Allen published, she reproduces dozens of tweets she received. Everyone should read these tweets simply to recognize the racist and anti-Semitic boorishness pulsing within Donald Trumps supporters–if not Trump himself. One tweet from DMT Trump Wizard goes “You cannot stop Donald Trump. White people are going to stop hating themselves and there is nothing you can do to stop it.” Another from War & Peace (an insult to Tolstoy) reads: “Jewish ancestry? 40%? 50%?” Another says, “You would be working a McDonalds if it wasn’t for affirmative action. What exactly are you bringing to the country?” The same person then attaches an anti-Semitic cartoon and writes, “I smell a jew.” Someone named Paul Harris asks, “why do third world people come to European ancestry countries to paracite of us? Why has the third world never created anything.” An exceedingly angry racist named Theodore Bundy sends multiple tweets including: “imagine, no more affirmative action. How will you get a job? This PC shit has destroyed a once great nation.” One writes, “My jewdar just went beep. Does the affirmative action negress have a bit of jew inside. No breaks on Trump train. Soz.” Aristides writes, “I can’t wait to see the look on your primitive monkey faces when the GOD-EMPEROR takes his throne. Go back to Africa posthaste.” And adds: “Wow, you are one butt-ugly n—er. Your face makes me sick to my stomach. Please gas yourself.” Ok, these tweets go on and on. Many are worse and call for Allen’s death. You should read them also to remind yourselves that speaking publicly takes courage.

Is Donald Trump racist and anti-Semitic? One can’t blame Trump or anyone for the opinions of his supporters. But when so many Trump supporters are so vocally racist and anti-Semitic, Trump owes it to himself and to the American people to publicly reject those vile opinions. That is a what someone must do if he aspires to be the leader of a multi-ethic and pluralistic democratic country. Not only has Trump not done so, but he has fanned the flames. Twice now he has retweeted tweets from members of white-supremacist groups, one of whose Twitter handle is @WhiteGenocideTM and whose profile tagline reads, “Get the f— out of my country.” Trump’s attacks on President Obama, his birther comments, his questioning of Ted Cruz’s citizenship, and his demonizing of Mexicans and Muslims have contributed to an atmosphere of hate that enables such racial attacks.

None of this means Trump himself is racist. He certainly does not pedal a consistent ideological racism of supremacy as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did. There is little to suggest that Trump would attack the laws guaranteeing equal voting rights or question the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Rather, Trump is responding at least in part to decades of repressed anger where many Americans have been told they can not speak their minds, express their feelings, or state their opinion. A dishonest and calculated political correctness has enabled Trump to appear as a liberator by unleashing a pent-up anger that is a result of a political culture that has prohibited people from saying what they believe. One real and meaningful attraction of Trump’s campaign is his refusal to self-censor and his embrace of an honest if also low-class and boorish racial anger. Trump as President would likely make the USA a less tolerant and more hateful and angry country. Such a cultural transformation very well could happen here, and it is, of course, dangerous.

But the real danger of a Trump presidency may lie elsewhere. After Trump’s victory in Nevada, he hammered home his main them: Grab as much as you can. “Now we’re going to get greedy for the United States we’re going to grab and grab and grab. We’re going to bring in so much money and so much everything. We’re going to make America great again, folks, I’m telling you folks we’re going to make America great again.” What Trump hates is politics, the collective striving after common ideals of democracy and justice. What he loves about America is simply its promise of abundance, not its tradition of self-government. Freedom for Trump is not the Arendtian freedom to act and speak in public in ways that matter; it is the freedom to get rich and plaster one’s name on buildings and reality television shows.

Alongside Trump’s contempt for politics is his dismissal of the rule of law. He threatens to ban Muslims, to bring back water boarding, and to kill family members of the Islamic State, which are all violations of either international or U.S. Law. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said recently on “Real Time With Bill Maher” that the US military should and would refuse to carry out such illegal orders if Trump as Commander-in-Chief were to issue them. Trump’s contempt for the law and all political and civil limits is part and parcel of his disdain for politics and all limits on what works.

No doubt Trump’s pragmatic and greedy America is part of America. But it is not the whole or even the best of the American tradition, a tradition that has its roots in Alexander Hamilton’s expressed hope in the first of the Federalist Papers that the United States would stand not for economic liberty but for political freedom: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, to decide by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” As corrupt as our political system is, the answer cannot be to simply demean and dismiss the nobility of our democratic and constitutional traditions. The danger Trump truly poses is that he seems to care only about the idea of America as a land of milk and honey and to have forgotten or simply dismissed the idea of America as a land of political liberty. And he seems ready, able, and willing to tear down our corrupt political structures with no plan or idea of how they would be rebuilt or re-imagined. Creative destruction is a classic axiom of capitalist innovation, but it rarely works so well in democratic politics. –RB

Mark Steyn comes as close to anyone in understanding both the appeal and the danger Trump represents. In a long and rambling account of his experience attending a Trump rally in Burlington, Vermont, Steyn writes: “And then the announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States, Donald J Trump…’ ~THE SHOW: He’s very good at this. Very good. On the same day as Trump’s speech, Peter Shumlin, the colorless dullard serving as Vermont’s governor, came to the State House in Montpelier to deliver his ‘State of the State’ address. He required two prompters so he could do the Obama swivel-head like a guy with good seats at Wimbledon following the world’s slowest centre-court rally. Two prompters! In the Vermont legislature! And for the same old generic boilerplate you forget as soon as you’ve heard it. Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever’s on his mind. This can lead to some odd juxtapositions: One minute he’s talking about the Iran deal, the next he detours into how Macy’s stock is in the toilet since they dumped Trump ties. But in a strange way it all hangs together: It’s both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign. It’s also hilarious. I’ve seen no end of really mediocre shows at the Flynn in the last quarter-century, and I would have to account this the best night’s entertainment I’ve had there with the exception of the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years back. He’s way funnier than half the stand-up acts I’ve seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing. Just to be non-partisan about this, the other day I was listening to Obama’s gun-control photo-op at the White House, and he thanked Gabby Giffords, by explaining that her husband Mark’s brother is an astronaut in outer space and he’d called just before Mark’s last meeting at the White House but, not wishing to disturb the President, Mark didn’t pick up. ‘Which made me feel kind of bad,’ said the President. ‘That’s a long-distance call.’ As I was driving along, I remember thinking how brilliantly Obama delivered that line. He’s not usually generous to others and he’s too thin-skinned to be self-deprecating with respect to himself, but, when he wants to get laughs, he knows how to do it. Trump’s is a different style: He’s looser, and more freewheeling. He’s not like Jeb – he doesn’t need writers, and scripted lines; he has a natural instinct for where the comedy lies. He has a zest for the comedy of life. To be sure, some of the gags can be a little – what’s the word? – mean-spirited. The performance was interrupted by knots of protesters. ‘Throw ’em out!’ barked Trump, after the first chants broke out. The second time it happened, he watched one of the security guys carefully picking up the heckler’s coat. ‘Confiscate their coats,’ deadpanned Trump. ‘It’s ten below zero outside.’ Third time it happened, he extended his coat riff: ‘We’ll mail them back to them in a couple of weeks.’ On MSNBC, they apparently had a discussion on how Trump could be so outrageous as to demand the confiscation of private property. But in showbusiness this is what is known as a ‘joke’. And in the theatre it lands: everyone’s laughing and having a ball. That’s the point. I think it would help if every member of the pundit class had to attend a Trump rally before cranking out the usual shtick about how he’s tapping into what Jeb called ‘angst and anger’. Yes, Trump supporters are indignant (and right to be) about the bipartisan cartel’s erasure of the southern border and their preference for unskilled Third World labor over their own citizenry, but ‘anger’ is not the defining quality of a Trump night out. The candidate is clearly having the time of his life, and that’s infectious, which is why his supporters are having a good time, too. Had Mitt campaigned like this, he’d be president. But he had no ability to connect with voters. Nor does Jeb (‘I’ve been endorsed by another 27 has-beens’) Bush.”

Matt Taibbi sees the appeal and the danger in Trump and worries he may well win. “In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ It’s a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive’s every public address. It’s a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a p-ssy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of ‘watermelons,’ while his opponents’ balls are more like ‘grapes’ or ‘raisins.’ Trump’s balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. ‘I never expect to hear that from you again!’ he says, grinning. ‘She said he’s a p-ssy. That’s terrible.” Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world–in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school–the candidate beams. What’s he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower. In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won: President Donald Trump. A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events–an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc.–this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised. It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average. His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people. He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets. Trump may travel to campaign stops on his own plane, but his speeches are increasingly populist as he rails against money in politics, big pharma and insurance companies. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. ‘The insurance companies,’ he says, ‘they’d rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding … It’s so hard for me to make deals … because I can’t get bids.’ He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that’s impossible because of the influence of the industry. ‘I’m the only one that’s self-funding … Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers.’ Trump isn’t lying about any of this.”

Adam Gopnik mourns the crescent croissant: “Why is a croissant shaped that way, anyway? The first truth is that they are not, necessarily. As veteran visitors to Parisian bakeries know, the superior, all-butter croissants are already commonly articulated as straight pastries–or, at least, as gently sloping ones–while the inferior oil or margarine ones must, by law, be neatly turned in. This sometimes leads those who expect clarity and logic, rather than complexity and self-cancelling entrapment, from French laws to think that the straight croissants are all butter and the curved ones are reliably not. The truth is that a butter croissant can be any shape it chooses, on the general atavistic aristocratic principle that, butter being better, it creates its own realm of privilege. One only wishes that Umberto Eco, whom we sadly lost last week, was still around to parse this issue, because Eco, long before he was king of the airport bookstore, was an emperor of signs, one of the world’s leading linguists and semioticians. The underlying logic for the croissant being a crescent, one suspects he would have said, is ‘Saussurean,’ after the great early-twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who glimpsed the truth that linguistic signs are arbitrary and find their meaning only by being clearly distinguished from other opposing signs. We know ‘Monday’ only because it doesn’t sound or look like ‘Sunday.’ P. G. Wodehouse, not surprisingly, showed his grasp of this rule when he had one of the Drones, on holiday in France, point out that he had been given a Continental breakfast consisting of ‘a roll shaped like a crescent and a roll shaped like a roll.’ Without the standard accompanying brioche, there would be no need for the curve; a roll-shaped roll produces a curved one, as ‘Sunday’ makes ‘Monday.’ The croissant, in this view, is curved in order to make plain what it isn’t as much as what it is. Murkier depths of meaning surely reside here, too, which would have taken Eco’s eye to plumb. Doubtless some social historian, a century or so hence, will get a thesis out of examining how, on the very verge of the threatened ‘Brexit’–the exit of England, at least, from the European Community–the mass marketers of Britain ostentatiously rejected a form seen as so clearly French that it is a regular part of that ominously named ‘Continental’ breakfast. Adding an arbitrary national shape to an established one to attempt an entirely English croissant, that future scholar will argue, is an affirmation of refusing to be one with Europe. (The crescent, moreover, is the sign of the Islamic empire, and some damp, suspicious kinds will see meaning in that, too.)”

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen reads the contemporary literature on habituation–that is, self-help achieved by the ritualisation of certain kinds of virtuous praxis. The topic goes back to Aristotle, and perhaps even farther, but Ratner-Rosenhagen thinks it’s missing something these days: “Much of today’s habits literature has a contemporary feeling, with its focus on time management, individual productivity, and business success, but the genre has a long history. For millennia, there has been a tradition of august thinkers writing about how healthy habits promote–and unhealthy habits undermine–self-fashioning and moral improvement. The ancient Stoics, for example, sought to understand how perfecting one’s reason by making it a habit could be the path to virtue. The Enlightenment psychologist Maine de Biran had a harder time squaring rigorous intellect and habitual practices, contending that ‘all that happens exclusively under the sway of habit should lose its authority before the eyes of reason’. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, was fascinated with habits. He had his own übermenschliche work habits, while at the same time he felt grateful to every bit of ‘misery and… sickness’ that came his way because they gave him ‘a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits’. Gertrude Stein couldn’t have disagreed more. For Stein, the habits of ‘daily island life’–those simple, unglamorous rituals of cleaning, eating, sleeping–were the means by which people who had lived through the savagery and chaos of two world wars could orient themselves with the simple and commonplace. As ever, the habits literature of today promises order in a disordered world, but it also comes with a subtle and significant difference. The most important difference is not the forgotten art of style, though the staccato prose, exclamation points, bland generalisations, and clichéd motivational quotations of today’s literature neither stimulate the imagination nor activate the will. Rather, it is the lost promise of habits literature as a form of ethical inquiry and social commentary. Individual improvement has always been the purpose of habits literature, but the genre used to require appraising the society in which the self, and the habits, formed. Historically, thinking about habits without social contexts or ethical consequences was unthinkable. Today it is axiomatic.”

Charles Duhigg writes about Google’s Project Aristotle seeking to understand why some corporate teams work better than others. The answer, it seems, has less to do with intelligence, leadership, or structure and more to do with psychological safety, or what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘”shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.'” Psychological safety in the new corporate lingo “‘…describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’ When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘team leader has poor emotional control.’ He added: ‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well. Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’ Rozovsky said. ‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’ Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms–the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique–put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team–enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun–allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized. For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well–like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. ‘We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’ Rozovsky told me. But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘People here are really busy,’ she said. ‘We needed clear guidelines.'” Duhigg writes that the rise of group work in Silicon Valley is driven by research showing that profitability and worker satisfaction increase when workers collaborate. What is unremarked is the confluence between the demand for safe spaces in universities and in corporations, which offers a whole new take on the corporatization of the university. –RB

Williams College has a student organization that sponsors an “Uncomfortable Learning” lecture series that brings speakers to campus whose views are out of step with the majority opinion on campus. The group made news back in October when it first invited and then–in response to campus opposition–disinvited Suzanne Venker–a conservative woman and author of The War Against Men. Now Robby Soave reports that the group has made news again after a speaker it invited was prohibited from giving his speech by Williams’ President Adam Falk. In a statement to campus, Falk writes: “‘Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech by John Derbyshire, who was to have presented his views here on Monday night. The college didn’t invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him. Free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard. The college has a very long history of encouraging the expression of a range of viewpoints and giving voice to widely differing opinions. We have said we wouldn’t cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances. In other words: There’s a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn’t yet found it. We’ve found the line. Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it. Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community. We respect–and expect–our students’ exploration of ideas, including ones that are very challenging, and we encourage individual choice and decision-making by students. But at times it’s our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community. This is one of those times.'” Zach Wood, a Williams student who helps run the “Uncomfortable Learning” series, explained his disagreement with Falk: “‘I think that President Falk is an analytic and deliberative leader and I respect his decision; however, I sharply disagree with his decision and if I could challenge it, I certainly would. I think his decision to cancel the speaker not only does a disservice to the intellectual character of our institution, but is antithetical to the principles of free speech and intellectual freedom that he has previously claimed to endorse. This decision is evidence of the fact that President Falk has failed to show support for student efforts to instill and promote political tolerance at Williams. I radically disagree with John Derybshire. And he has said offensive, even hateful things about minorities, things that I have a problem with. That is precisely why I was looking forward to taking him to task. If every student does not desire that kind of intellectual challenge, that is perfectly okay. But for President Falk to deny Williams students that opportunity, I believe, is not merely injudicious, but undemocratic and irresponsible.'” As I write this, I am in Saratoga Springs at a two-day retreat on how to talk about difficult questions like race and sex on campus. The conversations here are inspiring. Students come from communities all over the world with meaningfully different values and traditions, and they arrive on campus and have to figure out how to live with and talk to people whose worldviews challenge them. The students I speak with are genuinely curious and want to hear what others have to say. In most cases, then, there is a false debate between hate speech and free speech. It is not the students at Yale or the students at Williams who shut down speech. When free speech is sacrificed, it is not done by students. Rather it is cowardly administrators who fear criticism and don’t trust their students. –RB

Cypress Marrs takes a second to think about what Apple’s devices are: “This campaign, like so much of Apple’s marketing, attempts to render potential anxieties about new computing devices irrelevant. The customer has questions, gut level concerns–how will this device impact their privacy? Their political life? How they interact with other people? How they experience their life? Apple responds to these reservations with a nod and a wink. Its marketing campaigns show individuals using Apple’s technologies toward ends that stand in contrast to the reality that consumers fear the devices will bring into being. The devices are not marketed through a catalogue of their functions but rather by conflating their functions with what they may facilitate. To do this, Apple employs our shared symbolic language… As imprecise use of these symbols spreads, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to think acutely about the world around them. Likewise, Apple ads are attempts to radically reshape the ways–the symbolic tools–which individuals use to comprehend the world. As personal computing devices become increasingly intimate–as they move from the desk to the book bag, from the pants pocket to the wrist–the symbolic fun-house of Apple’s marketing continues to conflate what a device does with what it might do–the device becomes the time taken for a kiss, the appreciation of the skyline, and the revolutionary impulse in an authoritarian state. Such conflations in conjunction with the constant and intimate presence of telecommunication has shrunk the distance between the personal and the public–between an experience and the image of that experience. Taken together, all of this makes it difficult to conceive of ourselves–or even conceive of conceiving of ourselves–in relation to a large and symbolically complex whole.”

Stephen J. Rose defends residential colleges against the threat of MOOCs and online education. But in so doing, Rose makes an argument for what colleges do best that is hardly inspiring and that certainly abandons any notion that college education is about learning to think with and against a tradition of intellectual, scientific, artistic, and humanist inquiry. “Higher education essentially has two functions: First, for those who reside on or near campus, it provides a period of semi-independence and autonomy in a protected environment with many social interactions; and second, it develops the workplace skills of general cognition, ability to learn, task completion, group and organizational skills, and, for many students, a field-specific knowledge base. While Carey does show the limitations of the current system, he falls very short in showing how a MOOC-based system can be scaled up and produce better results in preparing young people to enter and succeed in the labor force…. [I]n virtually all modern, industrialized societies, higher education has become the main path for preparing workers for the new service economy based in offices, health care, and education. The costs of such education in dollars and time are indeed immense–but there is a large payoff for the economy as a whole.”

In her critique of the Rights of Man, Hannah Arendt analyzed the problem of the “abstract” human being who was nowhere to be found. If Arendt’s political analyses stemmed from her grappling with the Jewish Question and the problems of minorities or stateless people, this talk takes a different turn. Rather than considering the outcomes of the Rights of Man for subaltern groups or refugees, this talk follows the transformation of the Jewish Question when Jews themselves are no longer a minority, but sovereign citizens in their own ethno-national state. It considers some of the many ways in which Israeli Jews struggle to be Jewish-from conversion and keeping kosher to the everyday surveillance of goats-suggesting that popular sovereignty might not be liberating in the ways we imagine.

BIO: Joyce Dalsheim is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Global, International and Area Studies at UNC-Charlotte. She is a cultural anthropologist who studies nationalism, religion and the secular, and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She earned her her doctorate from the New School for Social Research, and has taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Wake Forest University.

Toni Morrison described Primo Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” Levi is the distinguished author of decisive books such as If This Is a Man, and The Periodic Table. For the first time the entire oeuvre of the most acclaimed Holocaust survivor is available in English, after a 7-years collective endeavor lead by Ann Goldstein, New Yorker editor and celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri. Together with Goldstein, the event will feature Michael F. Moore, a most accomplished translator from Italian and UN interpreter.

For more info on Goldstein and the Complete Works of Primo Levi, view interview: HERE.

Primo Levi, (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy-died April 11, 1987, Turin), Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, Dawn Herrera Helphand discusses why Bernie Sanders’ appeal illustrates how widespread the political sentiments that Hannah Arendt identified as the causes of revolution are in both parties in the Quote of the Week. Marshall McLuhan comments on the power of critical thinking against automatic movement in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the first issue of AJPA News, the official newsletter of the American Jewish Peace Archive (AJPA). Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of Laws” in this week’s Library feature.

Rukaya Al Zayani, a 27-year-old writer that focuses on Turkish politics, has shared several images with us of her personal Arendt library.

Here is what she had to say about her photographs:

Here is a picture of my Arendt current library. The reader is from a seminar class on Hannah Arendt from Bahcesehir Universite that was taught by a Turkish political theorist Prof. Gaye Ilhan Demiryol. It covers some of Arendt’s major works, including The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Between Past and Future, The Human Condition, and On Revolution.

Hannah Arendt has influenced my perspectives and how I see the world. I have been taking an Arendtian approach when it comes to terror and ideology, revolutions, and totalitarianism. The political philosophy of Arendt has inspired me to pursue political theory which I’m still trying to achieve.

Here is a picture of Arendt chilling with Simone de Beauvoir, Adorno, Marx, and Kafka. Illustrated by @hghareeb

I have written a piece that is influenced by Hannah Arendt’s philosophy.

Social Constructs

Part I

What is a revolution without a new beginning?
What is antisemitism without self-segregation?
And, what is totalitarianism without terror and ideology?

Part II

What is feminism without patriarchy?
What is white supremacy without colonization?
What is Marxism without Capitalism?
What are borders without governments?
What is Social Darwinism without humanity? And, what is existence without absurdity?

A picture of my cat Mika hanging out with Arendt.

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?

Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu, and we will feature them on our blog!

“The logic is clear–propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state… The public relations industry not only took this ideology on very explicitly but also acted on it, that’s a huge industry, spending hundreds of… by now probably on the order of a billion dollars a year on it or something and its commitment all along was to controlling the public mind.”

— Noam Chomsky

It has been a strange week for the opening of the American primaries with the Iowa Caucuses. But perhaps strangeness is not such a bad thing. Perhaps it is exactly what a truly vibrant democracy thrives on, as both Chomsky and Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism suggest. The unexpected is the stuff on which true participation, and not the mere playing out of propaganda, is made. Continue reading →

Edited and assembled by Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, two fellows of Trinity College in Cambridge at the time of its 1962 publication, the collection features 10 essays on social and political philosophy.

Overall, the anthology champions the promise of the “analytical” approach to philosophy.

Arendt made several annotations to her copy of this collection. For example, in an essay written by John Greville Agard Pocock, a historian of political thought, she underlined several passages over a two-page span. These sections read as follows:

“the human mind does pursue implications from the theoretical to the practical and from the practical to the theoretical”

“A philosophy reappears as an ideology”

“and that we possess means of distinguishing between the different functions which political thought may be performing, and of following the history of concepts and abstractions as they move from one employment to another.”

“To this process, once embarked upon, there is no known end, and our effort to understand the philosopher’s thought must be an effort not only to follow it, but to actually assist it, in its indefinite progress towards higher states of organization.”

“and he desires to make a single coherent story out of it all.”

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?

Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu, and we will feature them on our blog!

The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection’s digital entries, please click here.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Isabel Kershner in the New York Times reports that a pardon request by Adolf Eichmann was recently discovered–along with other original documents from his 1961 trial. “After he was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for his role in the annihilation of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, Adolf Eichmann pleaded for his own life. ‘There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,’ pleaded Eichmann–the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the lethal logistics of the Holocaust–in a letter dated May 29, 1962, the day that Israel’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal. Eichmann asked the Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for a pardon, arguing, ‘I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.'” Eichmann’s attempt to deny responsibility mirrors his arguments at his trial. But Kershner goes further and wrongly suggests that Arendt agreed with Eichmann’s appraisal. Kershner writes: “Eichmann’s role and influence in the Nazi machine has been the subject of historical debate. David Cesarani, a historian of 20th-century Jewish life who died last year, wrote a biography of Eichmann that cast him as a committed subscriber to Nazi ideology, rebutting the author Hannah Arendt’s famous appraisal of him as a banal bureaucrat who simply followed orders.”

Kershner’s suggestion that Arendt thought Eichmann was a bureaucrat who simply followed orders is a common misunderstanding. Over and again in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt says that the defense that he was following orders was Eichmann’s own argument, and she rejects it. While Eichmann was a bureaucrat, Arendt emphasizes that he also disobeyed orders when those orders contradicted what he took to be Hitler’s commands or his understanding of Nazi policy. Eichmann was not simply a follower of orders; he also took initiative and sought to innovate in carrying out his genocidal tasks. Quite simply, what Arendt means by calling Eichmann’s banal is not the banality of a bureaucrat who simply follows orders. That mistaken interpretation of Eichmann was made famous by Stanley Milgram. Arendt rejects Milgram’s conclusion that all of us have a bit of Eichmann in ourselves and that normal people obey orders they don’t support. On the contrary, Arendt argues that “obedience and support are the same.”

The claim that Arendt saw Eichmann as a banal bureaucrat mistakes Arendt’s argument about banality. To be banal is not to follow orders; it is to be thoughtless. Eichmann was banal because he could not think from the perspective of others. As I write in the latest volume of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, “Locked in the logical coherence of his own simplified view of the world, Eichmann held fast to the truths that gave meaning to his fantastic version of the world. In short, Eichmann was a dedicated Nazi. He sought and worked for a Nazi victory, and he was willing to do anything and everything within his power to contribute to the cause. He did not think hard or at all about that cause; Arendt wonders if he really understood it. But Arendt understands that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness names his willingness to do anything for a cause. What drove Eichmann to become a dedicated mass murderer was less hatred than a deep need to serve the Nazi movement that gave his life weight and importance.” Bureaucrats can be thoughtless, of course. but Arendt saw that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was not the thoughtlessness of a bureaucrat so much as it was driven by a deep need to find meaning and worth in belonging to the Nazi movement. She does not see him as simply following orders. The reason he must be hung, as she argues he must, is not that he obeyed orders but that he supported those orders. Eichmann claimed–and there is evidence to support him–that he personally disagreed with some of the orders. But the facts are that he overcame his objections and fully and enthusiastically carried out those orders. Eichmann took pride in the fact that he suppressed his personal and subjective revulsion and acted heroically for the good of a cause larger than himself. He did so, as Arendt saw, because he found his self worth in belonging to a world-historical movement. Read more here.–RB

Jedediah Purdy, at the end of the armed standoff over public lands in Oregon, considers Ammon Bundy and the other occupiers: “Finicum had told reporters that he would rather die in the occupation than go to jail. He seems to have regarded this as the proper and lawful attitude of a citizen. The Malheur occupation, which was triggered by disputes over ranchers’ use of public lands, has also been a theatrical public argument about the scope of legal violence in America. For nearly four weeks after the Bundys and their allies occupied Malheur, on January 2nd, it was the federal government that stood down as armed men (and a few women) defied its authority, used its buildings as a staging ground for a thoroughly improbable scheme to bring public lands under state and local control, and promised to meet force with force. As LaVoy Finicum must have known, a person facing arrest is not entitled to meet force with force, but really the occupiers were promising to meet law with counter-law. In their constitutional cosmology, a localist version of rock-ribbed originalism, they were the law in Malheur, and the federal agents the usurpers. Federal agents tolerated this secessionist theatre, allowing the occupiers to leave the refuge for groceries, permitting supporters to join the occupation, and even keeping electricity flowing to Malheur headquarters. But this indulgent attitude, presumably intended to avoid repeating the disastrous nineteen-nineties confrontations at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, could not last indefinitely. There could not be two governments in Malheur. The federal stance, which looked from the outside like diplomacy, turned out to be police strategy instead. When Ammon Bundy and other leaders left the refuge, they were done…. It is not a coincidence that only white men have filled this role, nor that the Ku Klux Klan is the major example of such vigilantism in the hundred and fifty years since the Civil War. That the Bundys imagined that their gathering could speak for ‘the people’ of the Western states, let alone of the country, revealed how anachronistic and narrow their vision of the country was. All ‘occupy’ movements, whatever they call themselves, have the problem that they claim to represent the people while being, in fact, a partisan fragment.”

Jonathan Chait goes beyond the silly complaint that Bernie Sanders is an idealist or that he won’t be able to get all of his proposed policies passed. Idealism is hardly a sin. Indeed it is a requirement for leadership. But Chait finds a deeper worry in Sanders’s candidacy. “Note that Sanders, asked about Republican opposition to his proposals, defined that opposition as ‘protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful.’ It is certainly true that fealty to the interests of the rich heavily colors Republican policy. But Sanders is not merely presenting corruption as one factor. It is the entirety of it. Likewise, Sanders has difficulty imagining any reason other than corruption to explain disagreements by fellow Democrats, which he relentlessly attributes to the nefarious influence of corporate wealth. One does not have to dismiss the political power of massed wealth to acknowledge that other things influence the conclusions drawn by Americans who don’t share Sanders’s full diagnosis. In reality, people have organic reasons to vote Republican. Some of them care more about social issues or foreign policy than economics. Sanders would embrace many concepts–‘socialism,’ big government in the abstract, and middle-class tax increases–that register badly with the public. People are very reluctant to give up their health insurance, even if it is true that Sanders could give them something better. What’s more, the interests of the wealthy do not cut as cleanly as Sanders indicates. It’s true that business and the rich tend to oppose parts of his program like higher taxes on the rich, more generous social insurance, and tougher regulation of finance. But the Obama administration’s stimulus encountered intense Republican opposition even though it did not pose a threat to any business interests. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce even endorsed the stimulus, which profited business both directly (by pumping billions into contracts for projects like infrastructure) and indirectly (by goosing public demand for its members’ products). That did not stop 100 percent of House Republicans from opposing it. Nor did the unified opposition of the business lobby dissuade Republicans from holding the debt ceiling hostage in 2011, or persuade them to pass immigration reform in 2013. Sanders currently proposes a massive infrastructure program, which would make lots of money for the construction industry. Clearly, subservience to big business only goes so far in explaining Republican behavior. The depiction of conservatism as a mere cover for greed is a habit Sanders indulges over and over.”

In short, Chait worries that there is a bit too much of the ideological true believer in Sanders, that he is someone who sees the entire world and all the problems of the world through one single lens: the evils of wealthy people and capitalism. Hannah Arendt argues that “an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.” We are all subject to the charm of ideology now and then. But ideologies become problematic, and dangerous, when they are believed. Arendt writes: “Ideologies are harmless, uncritical and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoics, everything follows as comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted…. The curious logicality of all isms, their simpleminded trust in the salvation of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality.” There is, no doubt, some truth behind Sanders’s relentless focus on income inequality and political corruption. The question Chait raises is whether focusing so sharply on one explanation for our political dysfunction purports to reveal a common truth but actually expresses a partisan fragment.–RB

Wyatt Mason in the NYRB discusses Laila Lalami’s writing about being a Muslim in the West. “Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, an essay by the Moroccan-born writer Laila Lalami appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In ‘My Life as a Muslim in the West’s “Gray Zone,”‘ Lalami, whose Ph.D. is in linguistics and who regularly produces opinion pieces, criticism, and essays on a range of cultural and human rights subjects, discussed some of the challenges she has faced during her quarter-century as a Muslim immigrant to the United States: ‘Some months ago, I gave a reading from my most recent novel in Scottsdale, Ariz. During the discussion that followed, a woman asked me to talk about my upbringing in Morocco. It’s natural for readers to be curious about a writer they’ve come to hear, I told myself. I continued to tell myself this even after the conversation drifted to Islam, and then to ISIS. Eventually, another woman raised her hand and said that the only Muslims she saw when she turned on the television were extremists. “Why aren’t we hearing more from people like you?” she asked me. “You are,” I said with a nervous laugh. “Right now.” I wanted to tell her that there were plenty of ordinary Muslims in this country. We come in all races and ethnicities. Some of us are more visible by virtue of beards or head scarves. Others are less conspicuous, unless they give book talks and it becomes clear that they, too, identify as Muslims.'” Mason continues, at the end of his essay: “As I write this, Donald Trump has spent the past few weeks hinting at and then saying explicitly that were he elected president, he would establish a database to track Muslims in the United States. That the outcry against such stupidity has been swift comes as no less a relief than his continued and increasing lead over his fellow Republican candidates remains a harbinger of a profound civic disorder. But such clearly unacceptable ideas–historically unacceptable; morally unacceptable; intellectually unacceptable; constitutionally unacceptable–have been muddled further by reactions to the horrendous news that a Muslim couple in San Bernardino (the wife swore her allegiance to ISIS on Facebook) slaughtered fourteen people at an event for employees of the county Public Health Department where the husband worked. ‘Our nation is under siege,’ Chris Christie said, campaigning in Iowa, after hearing of the shooting. ‘What I believe we’re facing is the next world war. This is what we’re in right now, already.’ And Jeb Bush broadsided that ‘they have declared war on us, and we need to declare war on them.’ That the prior week’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood by a devout Christian gunman did not produce a similar rhetorical outcry by the same candidates is, unambiguously, a difference based in race–in racism. It is a clear call to people of conscience that to be Muslim in America right now is to be enduring a period of terror in the land of the free. As Lalami wrote in The New York Times Magazine: ‘Terrorist attacks affect all of us in the same way: We experience sorrow and anger at the loss of life. For Muslims, however, there is an additional layer of grief as we become subjects of suspicion. Muslims are called upon to condemn terrorism, but no matter how often or how loud or how clear the condemnations, the calls remain. Imagine if, after every mass shooting in a school or a movie theater in the United States, young white men in this country were told that they must publicly denounce gun violence. The reason this is not the case is that we presume each young white man to be solely responsible for his actions, whereas Muslims are held collectively responsible. To be a Muslim in the West is to be constantly on trial.'”

Lizzie Wade thinks there’s something to admire in those who think the world is flat: “Take a look especially at the tweet that started it all: ‘The cities in the background are approx. 16 miles apart … where is the curve? please explain this.’ There’s something touchingly genuine about this to me, some deep seated desire to work through confusion and toward truth. This isn’t a man who never learned science, or who has some fundamentalist objection to examining empirical evidence about the world. This is a man who has looked at the world around him and decided that mainstream science isn’t doing a good job at explaining what he sees. So he’s collecting evidence, seeking out literature by well-versed ‘experts,’ and working out a better theory on his own. This is the hallmark of people I’ve come to think of as outsider physicists. You might know them by other names: loons, kooks, crackpots. Most scientists and science writers consider them a nuisance, as they often clog up our inboxes and even (shudder) voicemails with their wacky theories, desperate for validation. I occasionally get those emails, and I almost always ignore them. But years ago, the physicist-turned-science-writer Margaret Wertheim decided to pay attention to the fringe theories that came her way. ‘The Big Bang theory accepted by a majority of scientists constitutes the greatest blunder and misinterpretation in the history of cosmology.’ The universe is a ’12 lobed Raspberry in a dodecahedral configuration.’ And oh so many more. Some had an internal logic she could follow. Others made no sense at all. But as she wrote in her 2011 book Physics on the Fringe, their architects all shared a sense that physics had veered woefully off-track somewhere around the time it started relying on differential equations to describe invisible phenomenon, from magnetic fields to Higgs bosons. In the last 150 years or so, physics has taken a turn away from the intuitive and toward the abstract. It’s not rolling balls and falling apples anymore; it’s quantum states and curved spacetime. (And let’s not even get into string theory, which might as well be an outsider theory itself for all the experimental evidence it has backing it up–i.e., none so far.) That turn has left some people–perhaps B.o.B included–extremely unsettled. Physics is supposed to be about understanding the world I live in, they think. But I don’t see any time dilation/entangled quarks/curvature of the Earth when I look around me. Why should I trust this math I can’t understand over what I see with my own eyes?” The parting of science and common sense is one of the starting points of Arendt’s The Human Condition. The true world of science is one increasingly inaccessible to human understanding and human speech–even leading scientists know an increasingly partial and specialized bit of truth and cannot understand and explain what their colleagues in other fields know. One result is what Arendt calls world alienation, a skepticism about common sense. This loss of a faith in the common world is the root of our increasing inability to distinguish truth from lies.

An anonymous blogger (apparently scared of recrimination) writes on Blue Nation Review about her experience reading all of the emails Hillary Clinton wrote that were released during the month of August. The blogger, who had been a Clinton hater, fell for the former Secretary of State while reading her immense paper trail. “Her tenure as Secretary of State, of course, led to the bogus email scandal, which in turn led to the slow-drip release of the emails on her home server. I decided I was going to read them. In those emails, I discovered a Hillary Clinton I didn’t even know existed. I found a woman who cared about employees who lost loved ones. I found a woman who, without exception, took time to write notes of condolence and notes of congratulations, no matter how busy she was. I found a woman who could be a tough negotiator and firm in her expectations, but still had a moment to write a friend with encouragement in tough times. She worried over people she didn’t know, and she worried over those she did. And everywhere she went, her concern for women and children was clearly the first and foremost thing on her mind. In those emails, I also found a woman who seemed to understand power and how to use it wisely. A woman of formidable intellect who actually understood the nuances of a thing, and how to strike a tough bargain. I read every single one of the emails released in August, and what I found was someone who actually gave a damn about the country, the Democratic party, and all of our futures. She watched along with all of us as the Affordable Care Act made its way through Congress, with the same anxiety and aggravation many of us felt, and she rejoiced when it finally passed. She knew the Democrats who voted against it in the House, and she knew the ones who put their political careers on the line in support of it. The Hillary caricature you see in the press is not the Hillary Clinton I came to know by reading those emails. Yes, she had powerful friends in powerful places–though I didn’t actually see any emails from Goldman Sachs. And yes, she approached those friends the very same way she approached people on her staff, or people she met in the course of being Secretary of State. She rejoiced in their joys and shared their sorrows. They weren’t just ticks on a political scoreboard. They were friends. You could tell there were some squabbles internally with other members of the Obama administration, but there was also unflagging, utmost respect for the man who occupied the White House–the office she fought so valiantly to attain.” Clinton has been tone deaf to the email scandal. At the same time, the assumption behind the email scandal is that public employees have no right to private communication. Such an assumption will inevitably lead public figures to avoid exactly the kind of passionate and honest emails that the anonymous blogger finds in the cache of Clinton’s correspondence. If public figures can’t expect some privacy, how will they ever engage in the kind of risky, spontaneous, and honest conversation that is the soil of all thinking?–RB

Ramzi Fawaz considers the utopian potential of the comic book superhero and contrasts it with an approach derived from identity politics: “If one were to try and explain this question by turning to recent public debates about superhero comics, we might put forward the answer: ‘diversity.’ Yet this term and its shifting meanings–variety, difference, or representational equality–would have rung false to my thirteen year old ears. It was not simply the fact of Storm’s ‘diverse’ background as Kenyan, immigrant, woman, or mutant that drew me to her, but rather her ethical orientation towards those around her, her response to human and mutant differences, and her familial bond with her fellow X-Men. These were qualities significantly shaped by her distinct differences, but not identical to them. This was not any traditional idea of diversity then, understood as the mere fact that different kinds of people exist. Rather what Storm and the X-Men embodied was true heterogeneity: not merely the fact of many kinds of people but what those people do in relation to their differences. As I became a dedicated comic book fan, I realized that every issue of the X-Men was both an extended meditation on the fact that people are different from one another, and that this reality requires each and every person to forge substantive, meaningful, intelligent responses to those differences. As a teenage reader, I simply took this fact for granted as part of the pleasures of reading superhero comics. As a scholar years later, I came to realize that the ability to respond to differences and forge meaningful relationships across them was a capacity, a super-power if you will, that comics could train their readers to exercise, an imaginative skill fit for a truly heterogeneous world…. Recent public dialogue about the rapidly diversifying ranks of superhero comic books have overwhelmingly celebrated the increased racial, gender, sexual, and religious variety of America’s greatest fictional heroes. Yet every time a news outlet lauds the major comics companies for introducing a gay superhero, or a Pakistani superhero, or a classically male superhero replaced by a powerful woman, the historian in me thinks, ‘but comics were doing that in 1972, so what’s the big deal now?’ Certainly, one potentially distinct element of today’s push for diversity is the range of ‘real-world’ or identifiable differences comics are willing to name and represent on the comic book page. But in writing The New Mutants, I came to the conclusion that without an underlying democratic ethos or worldview, such real-world differences have little meaning.”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was one of the most important American political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin authored critical works such as Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Presence of the Past: Essays on State and the Constitution, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Wolin was the founding editor of the influential journal democracy (1981-1983), with the help Nicholas Xenos. In memory of Wolin, we discuss the work of political theory with Nicholas Xenos.

Jana V. Schmidt’s research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including “continental” philosophy and critical theory), and literature’s relation to violence. One nodal point for these inquiries has been the problem of reconciliation in the aftermath of the Holocaust. How to constitute a “world” after 1945 and how to integrate the victims’ memories into such world-making are crucial questions for her work. Hannah Arendt’s thought on conciliation, her literary writings, and her notion of world have shaped her answers to these questions in her dissertation, “An Aesthetics of Reconciliation – Intersubjectivity after the End of Community, 1945-1970.” Jana’s next project will investigate the figure of the survivor in postwar American literature and public Holocaust discourses. Other interests include Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, memory and memorialization, and the study of exile. An essay on the American painter Philip Guston and Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the figure is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Jana holds an MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is looking forward to teaching the First Year Seminar at Bard.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, Hans Teerds discusses how action and interaction both relate to the public space but how they differ significantly in where and how they occur in the world in the Quote of the Week. Horace reflects on how we can all live life to its fullest in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we realize the types of affairs conducted in the intimate kitchens of communist systems in this week’s Library feature.

Cristina, a lifelong student of Arendt, recently shared with the Hannah Arendt Center an image of her personal Arendt library.

Here’s what she had to say about her photograph.

“I’m Cristina. I’ m 35 years old, and I live near Venice in Italy. This is a part of my Arendt library.

“I’ve been studying Arendt’s thinking since I was at University. I’ve never stopped, even though I now work in a private company that doesn’t deal with philosophy.

“In 2004, I graduated after having completed my thesis entitled ” The Understanding of Totalitarianism in H.Arendt”. It is focused on the deep reflection that Arendt developed over the course of her lifetime in order to answer the following question: How could it happen?

“In my thesis, I analyzed how Arendt only through understanding tried to reconcile herself with the reality of what transpired in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Understanding isn’t the same as forgiveness, I realized; it is a way to find out your place in the world and your amor mundi. As a result, understanding oftentimes gives way to a painful, deep, and complicated process by which one presumably seeks to rediscover the original meaning of the human condition, of liberty, and of politics, as set against by terror, ideology, and concentration camps.

“In my opinion, Arendt’s thinking is a long process, and she delivers to us an essential hope: humanity is always an initium, and this ability can be safeguarded only in the silent plurality of our mind. The banality of evil, after all, is absence of thinking. This clear concept has deeply changed my thinking, and I’ve sought to safeguard it against the dangers and prejudices of ordinary life. I’ m proud of my library; it’s a part of me.”

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?

Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu, and we will feature them on our blog!

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Adam Gopnik investigates why some pasts are more available than others: “The most persistent mistake that historians and politicians have made in analyzing the modern world is to imagine, again and again–a fallacy shared by liberals and Marxists alike–that people will pursue their own economic interests in preference to their ideological fixations. They don’t. They never will. Nationalist ideology has been a much stronger force in the modern world than class interest. This dates at least to the memorable moment when the Great War began and socialists throughout Europe were sure that transnational class-consciousness would trump nationalist war fever. It didn’t. It never has. The better question may be what divides our past so radically between the things we remember and the things we don’t. It may be that the general force of anxiety that affects everything in modern life is also responsible for the way our pasts get divided. The truth about modern life is that it creates enormous anxiety at every moment. It’s like a traumatic force that suppresses some memories and refuses to suppress others at all. Our past is divided between the archival and the available exactly because it is so quickly past–so rapidly dissolved in confusion. We all want to stop the process of traumatic change from happening, and sometimes we do it by forgetting everything, sometimes by remembering almost too much. The Beatles linger; other bands unduly fade. (Do we really need to remember ‘Mr. Moonlight’ or ‘Don’t Pass Me By?’ We do, though.) When he was running for President the first time, Barack Obama got into some trouble for saying that people in small towns that had lost manufacturing jobs ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them’ as a way to explain their frustrations. It was impolitic, but, with a crucial proviso added, true: we all are clinging to something, if no more than an app at our Beatle-loving fingertips.” Gopnik is right that people cling to fantasies over and above their interests. Nationalism is at times one of those fantasies, but as Hannah Arendt points out, nationalism, while dangerous, is nevertheless limited by national boundaries. As bad as nationalism is, the real danger in the modern world is when coherent fantasies are ideological and transnational. This is part of what she means by the total domination of totalitarianism, when fantasies expand eternally with the aim of overrunning the world.–RB

Edward Mendelson praises President Obama’s college-age criticism of T.S. Eliot: “Obama sees that Eliot’s conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot’s conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot’s conservatism is Obama’s sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere. So the liberal Obama can respect the conservative Eliot, because both seek what are ultimately moral, not political, ends… Obama asks his friend, ‘You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?’ Instead of isolating Eliot in some social, ethnic, or sexual category, instead of hearing in him the voice of political or ideological error, Obama finds a deep ambivalence that might be felt by anyone, just as Kermode sees Eliot’s ‘shudder’ as a special case of something felt by everyone. And instead of making an assertion to his friend about her own ambivalence, Obama asks her a rhetorical question, because no one can be certain about someone else’s inner life, though sympathy makes it possible to guess. Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done.”

Dai George writes about the upcoming T.S. Eliot Prize and Citizen by Claudia Rankine: “The T. S. Eliot Prize carries serious money (£20,000, the most of any single poetry prize in the UK) and serious bragging rights. The list of its past winners doubles as a one-stop index of poetic celebrity on this side of the Atlantic: David Harsent, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, John Burnside, and Sinéad Morrissey take their places alongside a host of other stars in the contemporary British firmament. In recent years the prize has also acted as a lightning rod for minor controversy. David Harsent’s win last year led some observers to suggest that an oligarchy was rigging the system, dishing out prizes among its members while a growing constituency of smaller presses and their poets are effectively disenfranchised. One doesn’t have to travel too far down the road of conspiracy and recrimination to recommend the sober, factual analysis of Fiona Moore, a poet and blogger who has done valuable work crunching the numbers to prove how far British poetry prizes have to go before they can claim to represent the full breadth of an increasingly vibrant and diverse publishing ecosystem. The representation question feels particularly urgent this year since the favorite has to be Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a book that scrutinizes how black men and women–particularly black American men–are diminished and violated every day. It would seem a woeful category error to invite comparison between the serious, insidious brutality exposed in Citizen and this rarefied anxiety over how a book by a black woman will fare in competition for a literary prize that reflects the white cultural establishment–would seem so, were it not for the fact that Citizen confronts the white British literary establishment in its very text. In a passage titled ‘August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan,’ Rankine restages an encounter between her multivalent ‘you’ and ‘A man, a novelist with the face of the English sky–full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear briefly.’ They are talking at a party in an expensive house in Hackney, the borough that erupted into violence during the 2011 London riots. The casus belli for the riots was, ostensibly, the police execution of the unarmed Duggan, and our craggy, well-meaning novelist wants to know if Rankine would ever write about this moment of specifically British racism. His question, apparently innocent and engaged, turns into one of those flare points of estrangement that Rankine captures with gut-churning precision: Why couldn’t he write about it himself? ‘How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?’ Rankine pulls off a great, and slightly risky, technical feat when she turns the novelist by degrees into first ‘the man made of English sky’ and then simply ‘the English sky.’ By conflating him with the low-key melodrama of English weather, Rankine risks demeaning the novelist as an exotic ‘other’ himself, an object defined by the clichés of his homeland. But this transition to ‘sky’ works precisely because it enacts the inverted prejudice that prejudice provokes: the blankness, the zoning out from particularities, the reflexive withdrawal that occurs when someone feels unexpectedly isolated by racial assumptions.”

Over at Esquire, they have published one of the most fascinating surveys of the year. (OK, it is only January.) “American Rage” is an exploration of how angry we are and who is angry at whom. The results are worth considering: “LET’S BEGIN WITH THE BIG REVEALS: Half of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago. White Americans are the angriest of all. And black Americans are more optimistic about the future of the country and the existence of the American dream. There are depths and dimensions, dark corners and subtle contours to our national mood, and setting aside the issue of who actually has a right to be angry and about what–these pages are neutral territory; everyone is allowed their beef–we found three main factors shaping American rage. EXPECTATIONS: Are you disappointed? Do you feel stifled and shortchanged and sold a bill of goods? Then you’re probably pretty angry. Consider the white men and women in our survey: From their views on the state of the American dream (dead) and America’s role in the world (not what it used to be) to how their life is working out for them (not quite what they’d had in mind), a plurality of whites tends to view life through a veil of disappointment. When we cross-tabulate these feelings with reports of daily anger (which are higher among whites than nonwhites), we see the anger of perceived disenfranchisement–a sense that the majority has become a persecuted minority, the bitterness of a promise that didn’t pan out–rather than actual hardship. (If anger were tied to hardship, we’d expect to see nonwhite Americans–who report having a harder time making ends meet than whites, per question three–reporting higher levels of anger. This is not the case.) Indeed, despite having what many would consider a more legitimate case for feeling angry, black Americans are generally less angry than whites. Though they take great issue with the way they are treated by both society in general and the police in particular, blacks are also more likely than whites to believe that the American dream is still alive; that America is still the most powerful country in the world; that race relations have improved over the past eight years; and, most important in the context of expectations, that their financial situation is better than they thought it would be when they were younger. Their optimism in the face of adversity suggests that hope, whatever its other virtues, remains a potent antidote to anger.” And one further note: “Seventy-three percent of whites say they get angry at least once a day, as compared with 56 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans get angry at least once a day, as compared with 67 percent of Democrats. The least angry household-income brackets: the very rich ($150,000-plus) and the very poor ($15,000 and less). The most angry: the middle of the middle class.”

Mark Edmundson wonders at the fact that profanity seems to have the most power when children are the ones with the foul mouths: “I suspect that the swearing of kids cracks open illusions for adults. When a mom overhears her beloved child swear for the first time, her heart contracts until it feels like it will disappear. But imagine how she feels when she overhears a son or daughter who not only curses, but is truly adept at profanity–someone who summons up what Shakespeare might have been, if he decided to become practiced in the art of the headlong cursing symphony. And who knows, lover of language that he was, he may actually have created such compositions from time to time. What if mom hears her little boy, not long out of Pampers, still in shorts, reel off a euphonious string of curses that sounds like the work of a top sergeant in rage at his recruits? What’s lost then is the myth of innocence. Suddenly your child has become a kid. And what better way for the child to rebel against his period of confinement as a child than to become an adept curser? It’s not like having sex just at puberty, or holding up the neighbors with a wooden gun and scampering away with a wallet and a purse. But it really can create a gap, a true facture, between the self that was and the self that now is. The first time you hear your beloved 10-year-old say motherfucker: well, on that day something changes. Why does it disturb us so? I suppose something called parental narcissism is involved. We want the child to be perfect. We want the child to avoid all the wounds and disappointments that we suffered. We want the child to be without flaws. (For surely we had our flaws.) The child is a sort of second chance for us–a way to approach life another time and this time to get it right.”

Mensah Demary praises the New Year’s Resolution: “New Year’s resolutions attempt to correct that which has gone awry. It often doesn’t, in part because New Year’s resolutions are abandoned so often that their abandonment is woven into American culture. A local newscaster speaks over stock footage of round bellies jiggling on treadmills in gyms, and, at the end of the segment, offers a reminder that it’s okay if resolutions are forgotten, because there’s always next year, and no one achieves their resolutions anyway. Failure is assured, or implied. But while New Year’s resolutions are absurd, they are not without value. That the tradition even exists at all engenders a frame of mind necessary for personal change: Thinking about resolutions means I’m thinking about improving myself. I do need to return to the gym to remove the flab once and for all; I could also resolve to call my mother more often, or take a flight south to see her for the first time in four years; I might decide to write difficult essays that take me out of my head, my comfort zones, even if they won’t garner any immediate shares, or likes, or favorites. Expanding my reading tastes is a worthwhile resolution; I could certainly stand to read more often, which would mean less time for other things, such as Twitter, but this would be a small loss, a trifle to relinquish, since social media has become anathema to my artistic pursuits. (I would rather be known as a bad writer than a good tweeter; this is a realization that is so baffling to me, and unexpected, that I’ve been unable to do anything about it except to sit with it, turn it over, and find the lie in it, if it exists.) I could be a better sibling to my brothers and sister, as well as a better uncle to their children; I could turn to God as I deal with my mortality; I could stop wasting my money on the latest gadgets and take-out lunches, and any money saved could then be used to see more of the world with my partner. We could go to South America, or Central America, and I could peck out some words on my laptop at the beach, brushing sand away from my keyboard; I could look at the tapestries and churches, the sculptures and the jewelry, all the details my partner sees and points out; we could forget to take photos and instead resolve to remember it all, to use both of our minds to remember this one, singular trip for ourselves, and keep all of it in our heads and offline; I could finish my book, and make a note in the acknowledgements that the book was written on a trip with my partner, who reminds me of black love, of black friendship, of black power, black excellence, black family, Blackness with a capital B; I could resolve to taste more varieties of bourbon, to give gin another chance (but only one more chance), and to continue to laugh at all the wrong times, at all the wrong things; I could resolve to be even more absurd.”

Ron Srigley offers yet another condemnation of the modern university. But unlike most, he identifies what kind of universities he is writing about. “A word about which universities I have in mind, because not all universities are the same. I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions. Historically, these schools have had few graduate programs and have focused their curriculum on the liberal arts and sciences. Today they are abandoning this tradition at an alarming rate in favor of professional programs like engineering, nursing, education, and business. As they stand, these schools are about as similar to, say, the Claremont Colleges as pickled eggs are to Coquilles Saint-Jacques. They’re both universities, but … So just to be clear about my subject, I’m going to be talking about the pickled eggs.” Srigley writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which raises the following question: Why should we readers of the LARB care about the failure of lower-tier Canadian colleges? He answers that one, too: “But one more thing before I begin: Why should you, parents of students at Claremont or Stanford or one of the UC schools, care? What’s it to you how these universities are faring? Perhaps you shouldn’t care. But I think it might be good for you, for two reasons. First, it’s always good to think about the less fortunate. It can make you more merciful, because you see how fickle fate can be and how, social capital notwithstanding, one or two slight turns of the screw either way could have caused things to turn out quite differently. It can also build community and even create more equity because seeing others’ misfortunes tends to make us less inclined to add to them. But second, and more to the point, the disease from which my university suffers, yours does too. It’s not as bad where you are, stage one or two as opposed to stage four, but it is recognizably the same disease, and its just as aggressive: administrative bloat, student illiteracy, lots of ‘student experience’ but very little ‘student intelligence,’ dumb and dumber no longer a bad Hollywood joke but the unacknowledged consequence, if not the principle, of higher education. If you think I exaggerate, please read on. The university education you save may be your child’s.” And this is too good not to include: “During one class a couple of years ago, I dimmed the lights in order to show a clip of an interview. The moment the lights went down I saw dozens and dozens of bluish, illumined faces emerge from the darkness. That’s when I understood that a lecture or discussion is now only one of several entertainment options available to students in the university classroom. Given the way the game is played, lectures and discussions rank well below Facebook or Tumblr. You can’t get mad at them for this, not like in the old days. ‘Hey, you, pay attention! This is important.’ Say that today and you won’t hear anger or shame. You’ll hear something like: ‘Wha…? Oh, sorry sir. My bad. I didn’t mean anything.’ And they don’t. They don’t mean anything. They are not dissing you; they are not even thinking about you, so it’s not rebellion. It’s simply that the ground has shifted and left you hanging there in empty space, like Wile E. Coyote. Just a few more moments (or years) and down we’ll all tumble. These people look like students. They have arms and legs and heads. They sit in a class like students used to do; they have books and write papers and take exams. But they are not students anymore, and you are not a professor. And there’s the rub.”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the Blog, Wolfgang Heuer notes how it is worth analysing the different forms of violence and asking why and how they transgress various boundaries to approach omnipotence in the Quote of the Week. Sir Joshua Reynolds comments on the lengths to which a man will go to avoid the real labor of thinking in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2015 student opinion contest. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of Nisbet’s “Social Change and History” in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In commenting on the enormous dump of private email addresses associated with the marital affairs website Ashley Madison, Albert Wenger takes the approach of radical transparency. Since privacy will be impossible in the future, Albert proposes that we have to move past privacy. This means we need to change our values and our morals. “I believe that this hack and subsequent data leak provides a glimpse of a post privacy future. As I have argued before here on Continuations it is not ultimately possible to protect data and what we should be focused on instead is protecting people. Whether en masse, as in this case, or one person at a time, data will continue to come out. We need to work towards a society and individual behaviors that acknowledge this fact and if anything err on the side of more transparency and disclosure. People have always had affairs. There is nothing new about that. People have also used technology as part of their affairs. For instance, when letters were the technology of the day people wrote letters to their lovers, which then occasionally were discovered. That’s for instance how Eleanor Roosevelt found out about FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer. So it shouldn’t be at all surprising that people have been using the internet to have affairs. Facebook is apparently cited in one third of divorce cases. The way forward here is not to pretend that there is a technological solution or to be sanctimonious about affairs. Instead what we need is to acknowledge that affairs are part of human behavior.” The comments below Wenger’s essay are worth reading as well. As Ryan Borker writes: “I think a post-privacy world leads us dangerously close to a 1984 future. This is especially true since our actions, emotions, and even beliefs change. Since we’re ‘biologically designed’ to forget, full, permanent disclosure enabled by technology only prevents you from erasing the past. This would be horrible, since every single mistake you’d make is on public record.” The debate about full transparency and the move beyond privacy always has at least two steps. The first is technological, that privacy is impossible. The second is messianic, that transparency will lead to a new kind of human freedom. And there is always a suspicion that the second belief gives credence to the factuality of the first assumption. What is always overlooked is what is lost when privacy is lost. For Hannah Arendt, the great danger of full transparency was the sacrifice of depth, which is also the essence of thinking. Discussion about this drive for transparency will be front and center at the Hannah Arendt Center’s upcoming fall conference “Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?” You can register now.

Writing in The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo has a slightly different response to the Ashley Madison hack and the prospect of a post-privacy future. While agreeing with Wenger about the need for increased tolerance about personal indiscretions, Manjoo also thinks we need to take concrete steps to protect our privacy. “But the victims of the Ashley Madison hacking deserve our sympathy and aid because, with slightly different luck, you or I could just as easily find ourselves in a similarly sorry situation. This breach stands as a monument to the blind trust many of us have placed in our computers–and how powerless we all are to evade the disasters that may befall us when the trust turns out to be misplaced. ‘I feel reticent to blame people for ignorance or the consequences of their actions when they’re simply sitting there at home doing something perfectly reasonable in an environment where there was an expectation set for privacy,’ Mr. Hunt told me. ‘I think what this does is demonstrate that everything you put online may become public.’ There are several steps to take to minimize future damage from hackings like this one. But first, we could all become a bit more tolerant of online lapses; maybe the way to solve the problem of rampant disclosure of private stuff is to strive to look away from the stuff when it leaks–and to give those who’ve been harmed the benefit of the doubt. Second, we should all learn a little ‘opsec’–hackers’ jargon for ‘operational security,’ or a guide for conducting yourself online to minimize the possibility of your secrets getting spilled. It wouldn’t hurt the tech industry to help us in that endeavor, building warnings and guidelines into the same machines that are leaking our secrets. Perhaps we should even start teaching opsec in schools.” Manjoo goes on to list concrete technological steps to help protect your privacy online. His suggestions are worth reading.

Documentarian Hubert Sauper, whose most recent film is about the founding of South Sudan, talks about the kind of documentary about Africa he tries not to make and how he sometimes makes that movie anyway: “I don’t watch these very much because I get bored easily. Too many have the same tone. They’re actually very postcolonial. Basically: ‘I am from this sophisticated world, and I’m going to this chaos to show you guys back home in New York all these problems that these Africans have. And I will also, in the film, provide some solution, usually represented by someone from our culture.’ To stretch a cliché, it would be a blond woman from Europe or the US taking children under her arms. She is us, of course, and she is there doing a good job. It’s not only boring, it actually angers me, because it doesn’t stir people up, it comforts the audience. In a political sense, it’s counterproductive…They’re basically an extension of this Judeo-Christian salvation nonsense. It’s like Jesus comes and saves everyone. I went to Tanzania with my friend. You go to a village and, like with any other white person, the kids all run up to you to say hello, and you rub their heads. They look up at you as this figure from somewhere else, and you represent all these clichés that are implanted in our brains, our sick memory of colonialism: that we are hygienic, are wise, that we bring security–that we are something close to what we refer to as God. And we were doing just that. As two white dudes, that’s what you do. Sometimes we saw footage of ourselves, and it was painful. How stupid it looks. How awful. Then I saw this movie about Jesus, where that cliché is pushed to the breaking point. Jesus comes to these villages, he’s this long-haired, hippie-like dude and everyone looks up to him. It’s exactly the same! And I don’t know if you remember, but I took a piece of this movie–where Jesus brings all the fish–for Darwin’s Nightmare, because this is the same narrative. But my film is not [meant] to describe an injustice, or some kind of world that could be better, because if you do that, you’re claiming to know what ‘better’ is.”

Ruth Margalit profiles Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli writer enormously popular with Jewish Israelis who recently moved to Champaign, Illinois to teach Hebrew to college students. Kashua is, Margalit writes, “the most visible representative of Palestinian life in Israel.” But Kashua has left the Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem in which he lived, and he says he’s not going back. In her portrait, Margalit teases out the paradoxes–and the dangers–of Kashua’s identity: “Political debate in Israel is vigorous, if not always elegant, often summoning the old Hebrew phrase that describes ‘a dialogue between deaf people.’ But it has been dampened in recent years by a series of government-sponsored bills: one demanding that non-Jewish Israelis take loyalty oaths; another authorizing the finance ministry to withhold funds from organizations deemed–however vaguely–to be violating Israel’s foundational tenet of a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. Kashua, like other Arab Israelis in the public eye, was used to having his words scrutinized. But the summer’s events felt different. As the conflict in Gaza escalated into war, the première of a movie based on his memoir ‘Dancing Arabs’ was hastily scrapped. Flag-draped extremists in Tel Aviv brandished metal rods at antiwar demonstrators. The atmosphere of intimidation became so intense that Ayman Odeh, the youthful leader of the Joint List, an alliance of Arab-backed parties that represent Palestinian aspirations in Israel, announced that an ‘age of ostracism’ had taken hold. Within the Green Line that separates Israel proper from Gaza and the West Bank, Arab Israelis make up twenty per cent of the population. For liberal Israelis, and for Arabs who hope to be accepted as equals, Kashua embodied the country’s stated ideal of coexistence–of Arab Israelis’ full legal and civil integration. For a decade, he had lived with his wife, Najat, in Ramat Denya, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, and their children attended the city’s only bilingual school. In a country where columnists have a flair for grandiloquence, Kashua’s columns are conversational, confiding, anecdotal, centered on the rituals and trials of bourgeois life, like the ‘holiday tour’ that includes stopping at sixteen relatives’ houses, or the visiting electrician who reprimands him for his children’s excessive television viewing. While his writing is rarely explicitly political, a sense of uprootedness lurks; when the electrician, also an Arab, overhears the kids speaking Hebrew, Kashua can’t stop apologizing. Coexistence of the kind that Kashua represents seems increasingly out of reach these days, when more than a third of Jewish Israelis openly say that Arab citizens shouldn’t be entitled to equal rights. Of 1.7 million Arabs in Israel, perhaps forty thousand lead middle-class lives in mixed cities. Ayman Odeh told me that his party’s goal is for Arab citizens ‘to take part in every institution in the country–except for security, foreign relations, and immigration absorption, because these institutions blur the lines of our national identity.’ But even his more hopeful speeches don’t envision such inclusiveness for ten more years.”

Marcela Valdes writes in The New York Times Magazine about what causes the admiration among the Spanish speaking audience in the United States for journalist Jorge Ramos–the journalist whose recent confrontation with Donald Trump has made him a hero to some. “A few months later, Ramos asked the former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari if he had ordered the assassination of his would-be successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in 1994, a death that traumatized Latin American politics for years. Salinas’s response, transcribed in Ramos’s 2001 book, ‘A la caza del león‘ (‘Hunting for the Lion’), begins with this parry: ‘Luis Donaldo Colosio was my dear friend.’ Dissatisfied with the absence of an explicit no, Ramos renews his attack: ‘I want to ask again: You had nothing to do with Colosio’s assassination?’ ‘I was among those who lost the most with Colosio’s death,’ Salinas replies. It is precisely this pattern of confrontation–not his poker-faced anchoring of the nightly news with his colleague Maria Elena Salinas on ‘Noticiero Univisión‘–that has won Ramos the trust of so many Hispanics. They know that in many countries south of the United States, direct questions can provoke not simply a loss of access but also a loss of life. Ramos’s aggressive reporting on Latin America is possible because he is based in Miami. ‘The United States is my journalistic trench,’ he has written, ‘and I am extremely grateful.’ It’s very unlikely that he expected to contend with bodyguards here.”

Randall Smith argues that the situation of adjunct professors at our nation’s largest universities is so abysmal that the time has come for the guild of university professors to fight for their poorest and most abused members. He calls for a general strike. “Today, adjunct instructors make up half or more of all faculty. There is, of course, a legitimate role for such faculty. The category was created to cover those outside the academy who might come in to share their expertise in a special course–say, for example, a marketing executive who comes in to teach a business school course on marketing. These people aren’t looking to achieve a tenured academic position, but they are ‘faculty’ nonetheless. What such people are generally paid is what we might call an ‘honorarium’ rather than a salary. We can’t really afford to pay the high-level executive what she earns at her regular job, but we feel it ‘honors’ her to be paid something. The justification for not paying them benefits is due to the presumption that they have benefits (and usually better benefits) through their full-time jobs, and so offering them employee benefits such as health insurance (as opposed to, say, free parking, use of the library, and access to the gym) would be superfluous. The kind of ‘adjunct’ faculty we’re discussing now, however, are not in this category. Most of the adjunct faculty that now make up more than half of higher education faculty are not ‘honored’ members of the community who have come into the university to provide students with the benefits of their practical experience. They are hired at poverty-level wages with no health-care benefits and no guarantee of continued employment from semester to semester…. Senior faculty must demand basic justice for those who are at the lowest end of the hierarchy and who are the weakest before the ever-increasing power of the corporate university establishment: the ‘invisible’ men and women of the adjunct faculty. These academic guilds have been able to get themselves together to do all sorts of things–print journals, arrange conferences in expensive hotels in big cities, condemn apartheid, affirm global warming, decry racism–but somehow they never have had the time or will to vote for something that might involve ‘goring their own ox,’ so to speak: namely, a nationwide strike among all the guilds of any and all institutions that do not agree to transition all adjunct faculty in the country who do not have full-time jobs elsewhere to ‘Instructor’ or ‘Assistant Professor’ rank, with a regular salary and health-care benefits.”

Zach Dundas suggests Sherlock Holmes is as much a product of a fascinated culture as the work of one man: “As I researched my recent book The Great Detective, an examination into the history of Sherlock Holmes in popular culture, I was struck by the degree to which Conan Doyle’s creation belongs to others as much as to him. Long before the post-meta-everything fan fiction milieu took over, Sherlock Holmes evolved as a boundless collaborative project, with many hands molding critical components of the mythos. The actor William Gillette, for example, helped enshrine ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ as the detective’s motto; illustrator Sidney Paget welded Holmes to his deerstalker. The character thrived because so many people grabbed this and that from Conan Doyle and made it their own. And yet, paradoxically, Holmes remains Conan Doyle’s creature, too–essentially of the author, but not wholly by him any more. So it is with Old Holmes: the idea of the detective in his retirement, even dotage, aged far beyond the Victorian era of his canonical adventures. Many have taken their crack. At this point, with literally millions of fan-fiction stories adrift on the Internet’s high seas and uncounted thousands of more conventional pastiches and parodies gathering dust in collectors’ libraries and used bookshops, there have been innumerable extra-Conan Doyle versions of retired Sherlock Holmes. A quick consultation of amateur fan-fiction websites like Archive of Our Own reveals ‘Retirementlock’ as a healthy subgenre within a vast literary sub rosa. But like all things Sherlockian, Old Holmes starts with Conan Doyle himself.”

In five easy lessons, Scott Horton explicates the complicated relationship that politicians have with their secrets. Lesson one: “Secrets are routinely leaked by politicians for political gain; many of those who regularly complain about leaks are leakers themselves. The current controversy offers us a whirlwind of leaks within leaks and leaks about leaks. If it leaves any lasting footprint, then it will be as a demonstration of the art of simultaneously leaking and suppressing information to serve purely partisan political goals.” Also worth noting is Lesson Five: “Secrecy regularly deprives decision-makers of the information they need in order to form valid judgments. Beltway insiders routinely agree that Washington makes far too many secrets. They also accept that secrecy is a tool used for bureaucratic antics. But by and large they insist that there’s no real downside to the secrecy game. This is nonsense. In fact, secrecy regularly stands in the way of an informed public and a sensible political discussion of questions that are vital for the nation’s future. It protects those who have made serious mistakes and fear accountability.” Horton will be speaking on privacy and security with Robert Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, at the upcoming Hannah Arendt Center conference “Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?” You can register now.

This week on the Blog, Jennifer M. Hudson discusses how bureaucracy, as imagined by both Kafka and Arendt, embodies an ideology of necessity through which humans abdicate responsibility for their common world in the Quote of the Week. Thomas Jefferson comments on the value and glow of thoughts in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. We welcome Dr. Ulrich von Bulow, a visiting scholar with the Hannah Arendt Center and the German Studies Program, to Bard College. Finally, Ryan Butler, a student of environmental activism, shares an image of his personal Arendt library with us in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

As Pope Francis prepares to visit the United States, Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books writes that the Pope’s encyclical on the environment is “entirely different from what the media reports might lead one to believe.” The Pope is not simply concerned with the environmental challenges of global warming. His aim is higher, calling for a massive reconsideration of our ethical connection to the natural and technological world. “The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, ‘a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.’ He is no Luddite (‘who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?’) but he insists that we have succumbed to a ‘technocratic paradigm,’ which leads us to believe that ‘every increase in power means “an increase of ‘progress’ itself”…as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.’ This paradigm ‘exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.’ Men and women, he writes, have from the start ‘intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.’ In our world, however, ‘human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.’ With the great power that technology has afforded us, it’s become ‘easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.’ The deterioration of the environment, he says, is just one sign of this ‘reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.’ And though ‘the idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm…is nowadays inconceivable,’ the pope is determined to try exactly that, going beyond ‘urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution’ to imagine a world where technology has been liberated to serve the poor, the rest of creation, and indeed the rest of us who pay our own price even amid our temporary prosperity. The present ecological crisis is ‘one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity,’ he says, dangerous to the dignity of us all.”

Jelani Cobb, writing about the closure of his alma mater, Jamaica High School in Queens, suggests in his conclusion that there are important differences between the school reform of the late 20th century and that of today; Jelani thinks we may have been closer to getting it right before: “In a way, the protests over school closure are a bookend to the riots that broke out over busing four decades ago. Like ‘busing’ and ‘integration,’ the language of today’s reformers often serves as a euphemism for poverty mitigation, the implicit goal that American education has fitfully attempted to achieve since Brown v. Board of Education. Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility–of blame, really–run inward. It’s not society that has failed, in this perspective. It’s the schools. In 1954, Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s arguments about the pernicious effects of racism on black children implicated white society. Sixty years later, arguments that black students associated studiousness with ‘acting white’ were seen not as evidence of the negative effects of internalized racism but as indicators of pathological self-defeat among African-Americans. The onus shifted, and public policy followed. The current language of educational reform emphasizes racial ‘achievement gaps’ and ‘underperforming schools’ but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened. Integration was a flawed strategy, but it recognized the ties between racial history and educational outcomes. Last year, a study by the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found that New York has the most segregated school system in the country, a reflection of the persistence of the housing patterns that Arthur Levitt talked about in 1954 but also of the failure of the integrationist ideal that was intended to address it. From that vantage point, the closure of Jamaica seemed to be less about the interment of a single school than about the impeachment of a particular brand of idealism regarding race and, by extension, American education. Ninety years ago, the City of New York broke ground on a huge, beautiful building as a symbol of its commitment to public education. Last year, it closed the school that the building housed, purportedly for the same reasons. The people who gathered angrily outside Jamaica High School weren’t really protesting its closing; they were protesting the complex of history, policy, poverty, and race that had brought it about.” Cobb makes an excellent point. Nevertheless, what are we to make of the failure of the big, beautiful buildings and the big, well-compensated bureaucracies whose mission it is to address the inequalities and inadequacies of education in America?

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal writes that the Trump phenomenon is manifesting a chasm between elites and the masses that threatens to transform the world of American politics. She reports anecdotal evidence of a non-partisan mass of voters from all over the political and economic spectrum gravitating toward Trump. And the overriding theme she encounters is a disdain for political, economic, and mainstream elites. “On the subject of elites, I spoke to Scott Miller, co-founder of the Sawyer Miller political-consulting firm, who is now a corporate consultant. He worked on the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 and knows something about outside challenges. He views the key political fact of our time as this: ‘Over 80% of the American people, across the board, believe an elite group of political incumbents, plus big business, big media, big banks, big unions and big special interests–the whole Washington political class–have rigged the system for the wealthy and connected.’ It is ‘a remarkable moment,’ he said. More than half of the American people believe ‘something has changed, our democracy is not like it used to be, people feel they no longer have a voice.’ Mr. Miller added: ‘People who work for a living are thinking this thing is broken, and that economic inequality is the result of the elite rigging the system for themselves. We’re seeing something big.'” The mobilization of the masses outside and beyond traditional class boundaries is, of course, the kindling for all mass movements. And as Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, movements feed on mass appeal founded upon moods and feelings rather than policies or interests: “Long before Nazism proudly pronounced that though it had a program it did not need one, Pan-Germanism discovered how much more important for mass appeal a general mood was than laid-down outlines and platforms. For the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps itself in constant movement.” The point here is not that Trump is anything like the Nazis; he is not. But he is one of a series of politicians over the last 10-15 years that has fed upon the mobilization of masses in opposition to the perceived corruption and elitism of state and economic forces. Trump is both a symptom and a motor of the massive disillusionment of the American masses, our loss of faith in governmental and mainstream institutions from Congress to town halls, from the police to schools. Trump may be boorish, but he speaks truth to many, truths that elites would rather snicker at than engage. Whatever happens to Donald Trump’s candidacy, one wonders when, and if, the elites in this country will wake up and realize his popularity is founded upon a profound and real disdain that many, many Americans have for our advanced, progressive, and technocratic culture. What is more, at the end of her essay, Noonan writes that it is not only the masses but also the elites who think the game is rigged. This new version of what Arendt called the “temporary alliance of the mob and the elite” is worth attending to. For when the elites abandon mainstream institutions and join the mob in tearing down rather than building up, that is when the mobilization of movements threatens to get dangerous.

Jonathan Jones thinks about this week’s shootings of a television reporter and her cameraman live on the air in terms of the paradox of reality TV: “The sense that we somehow have a right to see this, the decision of many media outlets to screen it, has a lot to do with the television trappings of this crime. Because part of the attack was seen and heard live on air, because the victims and the perpetrator all worked for the same TV station, there’s something stagey about it all. Sadly people so enjoy true life crime stories and this one has a hokey TV setting that recalls many fictional plots of films and TV programs. It exposes the paradox of ‘reality television’–that people on television are not real to the audience at all. The death of a presenter is therefore something that can be replayed on screens with impunity. To see how bizarre and improper this is, imagine if anyone broadcast or hosted a serial killer’s videos of graphic murders. How is viewing this better?”

Israeli author Etgar Keret suggests there are some unique challenges to translating from Hebrew: “I think that the most dominant aspect is the language. When I published my first book, I would say 90 percent of the reviews [in Israel] were simply about the language and the choice of language. And when my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation. Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history. About 2,000 years ago, people stopped speaking Hebrew because of the diaspora. So people who went to Rome spoke Latin, people who moved to the US spoke English, people spoke Yiddish, but they didn’t speak Hebrew. They knew the words, but it was a written language–they read prayers, they knew the language well, but it wasn’t spoken. I think the logic behind it would be that you don’t need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are. Then somebody took this frozen language and defrosted it in the microwave of history, and people spontaneously started speaking it. And the thing that happened when people started speaking this language is it was kind of a miracle. If Shakespeare were to come here and hear us speak, he wouldn’t understand a word we were saying, but if Abraham or Isaac took a taxi in Israel, they could communicate with the taxi driver. He’d understand what they are saying because the language didn’t organically change. It was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible. We import words from other languages and we put them in Israeli verb form. Like for cocaine, we say in Hebrew, lesniff. We have many words like this from Russian, from Arabic. What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time. So when my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it’s both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn’t write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. It’s all in the language, and that’s one thing that doesn’t translate.”

Pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante considers the influence of feminism on her writing, particularly the idea that the personal is political: “From it I learned that even the most intimate individual concerns, those that are most extraneous to the public sphere, are influenced by politics; that is to say, by that complicated, pervasive, irreducible thing that is power and its uses. It’s only a few words, but with their fortunate ability to synthesize they should never be forgotten. They convey what we are made of, the risk of subservience we are exposed to, the kind of deliberately disobedient gaze we must turn on the world and on ourselves. But ‘the personal is political’ is also an important suggestion for literature. It should be an essential concept for anyone who wants to write…In short, I am a passionate reader of feminist thought. Yet I do not consider myself a militant; I believe I am incapable of militancy. Our heads are crowded with a very heterogeneous mix of material, fragments of time periods, conflicting intentions that cohabit, endlessly clashing with one another. As a writer I would rather confront that overabundance, even if it is risky and confused, than feel that I’m staying safely within a scheme that, precisely because it is a scheme, always ends up leaving out lots of real stuff because it is disturbing. I look around. I compare who I was, what I have become, what my friends have become, the clarity and the confusion, the failures, the leaps forward. Girls like my daughters appear convinced that the freedom they’ve inherited is part of the natural state of affairs and not the temporary outcome of a long battle that is still being waged, and in which everything could suddenly be lost. As far as the male world is concerned, I have learned, contemplative acquaintances who tend either to ignore or to recast with polite mockery the literary, philosophical, and all other categories of work produced by women. That said, there are also very fierce young women, men who try to be informed, to understand, to sort through the countless contradictions. In short, cultural struggles are long, full of contradictions, and while they are happening it is difficult to say what is useful and what isn’t. I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.”

This week on the Blog, Jennie Han discusses how in order to live an authentic public life, one must begin in the sphere of the private where one can confront and take ownership of one’s thoughts and principles in the Quote of the Week. Also, we appreciate several annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Hans Jonas’s “The Phenomenon of Life”in this week’s Library feature.

“The force of the machinery in which the K. of The Trial is caught lies precisely in this appearance of necessity on the one hand, and in the admiration of the people for necessity on the other. Lying for the sake of necessity appears as something sublime; and a man who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean his death, is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.… It has been characteristic of our history conscious century that its worst crimes have been committed in the name of some kind of necessity or in the name–and this amounts to the same thing–of the ‘wave of the future.’”

— Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation (On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his death)”, Partisan Review

Necessity signifies the absence of choice; therefore, freedom and necessity, as principles, are logically opposed. Enlarging the concept of simple necessity, imagining it as a type of perpetual motion “machinery” or “the ‘wave of the future’ amplifies this opposition. Necessity as “progress,” or providence, becomes a deterministic force that would take away our capacity to shape our human world and future. Arendt’s concern in this passage is not, however, the myriad ways in which real human needs restrict sovereign human action. Instead, she points to an ideology of necessity–“the admiration of the people for necessity”–through which human beings abdicate responsibility for their common world by way of false beliefs in their own helplessness in an uncertain world and, simultaneously, their power to control this world using artificial means. Bureaucracy, both symbolically in Kafka’s novels and in Arendt’s appraisal of actually existing configurations, is the tangible manifestation of this ideology. Continue reading →

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Walter Russell Mead, a son of South Carolina, argues that one lesson of the response to the Dylann Roof shooting is how the black church holds an exceptional place in American culture. “But beyond all the yapping and the buzzing about gun control, the Confederate flag, and whether Dylann Roof was a terrorist or not, a very powerful truth emerged from the horror in Charleston: that the African-American church remains one of America’s great national blessings. Yet again the African American church in the United States bore steadfast witness to the boundless, the infinite, the compassionate love of God. When the families of the murdered, martyred saints told Dylann Roof that they forgave him, when they prayed that he in his darkness might somehow find the light and the love of God, they reminded us what heroism truly is, and they showed us all what it means to follow Jesus Christ. Too often the worst people in the religious world dominate the headlines: hucksters and hustlers, money-grubbing televangelists, preacher-politicians, judgmental hypocrites, and sanctimonious snake oil peddlers. But every now and then something happens to show us what Christianity really is, and when it does the world stops in awe. President Obama was right to make grace the focus of his riveting eulogy; grace is always amazing, and without it no person, no family, and no nation can stand. Watching the news from Berlin, I was reminded yet again that if the United States can be said to be an exceptional nation, it is the black church that has helped to make us one. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, blacks (often after suffering rejection by white churches) organized their own congregations and denominations. Black churches were the first serious social institutions that African Americans were free to shape and control in their own way, and the spiritual and cultural blessings that have come to Americans of all races and indeed to the whole world from the witness and work of the black church are greater than most of us have ever understood.”

In an essay formed as a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates takes on an American rhetoric on race derived from a certain very famous speech about a dream: “That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about ‘hope.’ And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.”

Governments around the world insist on the need and the right to read and listen to what potential terrorists or enemies write and say. To balance security with privacy, there is a demand that governments have the right to subpoena records from internet and telephony providers. And governments–worried that new encryption technology will make such practices impossible–are considering legislation that would essentially mandate the keys to the internet. But a fascinating report by leading encryption experts argues that such a move would be disruptive and dangerous. “The goal of this report is to similarly analyze the newly proposed requirement of exceptional access to communications in today’s more complex, global information infrastructure. We find that it would pose far more grave security risks, imperil innovation, and raise thorny issues for human rights and international relations…. The greatest impediment to exceptional access may be jurisdiction. Building in exceptional access would be risky enough even if only one law enforcement agency in the world had it. But this is not only a US issue. The UK government promises legislation this fall to compel communications service providers, including US-based corporations, to grant access to UK law enforcement agencies, and other countries would certainly follow suit. China has already intimated that it may require exceptional access. If a British-based developer deploys a messaging application used by citizens of China, must it provide exceptional access to Chinese law enforcement? Which countries have sufficient respect for the rule of law to participate in an international exceptional access framework? How would such determinations be made? How would timely approvals be given for the millions of new products with communications capabilities? And how would this new surveillance ecosystem be funded and supervised? The US and UK governments have fought long and hard to keep the governance of the Internet open, in the face of demands from authoritarian countries that it be brought under state control. Does not the push for exceptional access represent a breathtaking policy reversal? The need to grapple with these legal and policy concerns could move the Internet overnight from its current open and entrepreneurial model to becoming a highly regulated industry. Tackling these questions requires more than our technical expertise as computer scientists, but they must be answered before anyone can embark on the technical design of an exceptional access system.”

James McAuley has an essay holding up Arendt’s idea of the conscious pariah as a model for a 21st century cosmopolitanism. “[T]here is more to Arendt’s unsettled legacy than glamour, controversy and a provocative set of historical and philosophical interpretations. Forty years after her death, perhaps the most enduring contribution of this decidedly 20th-century thinker is her thinking about a cosmopolitanism suited to the challenges of the 21st century she’d never see…. Hannah Arendt never wrote explicitly on cosmopolitanism, or indeed even used the term, but she was a model cosmopolitan. She loved her adopted US, but never effaced her past to fabricate a new present. Her understanding of Jewish history and her experience of her own Jewishness remained central to her life and to her work, helping to illuminate a disparate, difficult whole. Arendt was fascinated by the concept of ‘the pariah’, the outcast, which in her mind conveyed the Jewish experience in Europe. As she wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, Jews ‘always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success’. For Arendt, being a pariah was not an inherently negative position; it could also bring a certain value. In a series of essays written in the 1940s, she referred to the poets and writers Heinrich Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Bernard Lazare, and Franz Kafka as conscious pariahs. By this, she meant they never escaped their Jewishness but also used their difference ‘to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life’, who administered ‘the admission of Jews as Jews into the ranks of humanity’. In other words, who did not efface their particularity but celebrated it, finding within it a world of substance on a universal scale. This was the crux of her cosmopolitanism.”

Slavoj Zizek argues that Greece and its debtors aren’t talking in the same language, and then he picks a side: “That a compromise formula always eludes at the last moment in the ongoing negotiations between Greece and the EU administrators is in itself deeply symptomatic, since it doesn’t really concern actual financial issues–at this level, the difference is minimal. The EU usually accuses Greeks of talking only in general terms, making vague promises without specific details, while Greeks accuse the EU of trying to control even the tiniest details and imposing on Greece conditions that are harsher than those imposed on the previous government. But what lurks behind these reproaches is another, much deeper conflict. The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, recently remarked that if he were to meet alone with Angela Merkel for dinner, they would find a formula in two hours. His point was that he and Merkel, the two politicians, would treat the disagreement as a political one, in contrast to technocratic administrators such as the Eurogroup president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. If there is an emblematic bad guy in this whole story, it is Dijsselbloem, whose motto is: ‘If I get into the ideological side of things, I won’t achieve anything.’ This brings us to the crux of the matter: Tsipras and the former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned on 6 July, talk as if they are part of an open political process where decisions are ultimately ‘ideological’ (based on normative preferences), while the EU technocrats talk as if it is all a matter of detailed regulatory measures. When the Greeks reject this approach and raise more fundamental political issues, they are accused of lying, of avoiding concrete solutions, and so on. It is clear that the truth here is on the Greek side: the denial of ‘the ideological side’ advocated by Dijsselbloem is ideology at its purest. It masks (falsely presents) as purely expert regulatory measures that are effectively grounded in politico-ideological decisions.”

Martin Rees makes the optimist’s case for the human capacity to evolve past our human limitations. “The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient civilisations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another culture–one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and spreading far beyond earth. Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There are those who fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our jobs and living beyond the writ of human laws. Others regard such scenarios as too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements are about the rate of travel, not the direction. Few doubt that machines will one day surpass more of our distinctively human capabilities. It may take centuries but, compared to the aeons of evolution that led to humanity’s emergence, even that is a mere bat of the eye. This is not a fatalistic projection. It is cause for optimism. The civilisation that supplants us could accomplish unimaginable advances–feats, perhaps, that we cannot even understand.”

Jill Lepore profiles Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders: “Sanders ran for office four times–twice each for governor of Vermont and the U.S. Senate–before running for mayor of Burlington and winning by ten votes. In 1981, he took office in Burlington; Reagan took office in Washington. Sanders isn’t a Debsian socialist; he’s a socialist in the sense that Reagan used that word to describe L.B.J. ‘He campaigned on the promise of a better life for the working man,’ Alan Richman wrote in the Boston Globe. ‘Nobody seemed to mind that the dream Sanders believes in is called socialism.’ He drew the attention of the national press when he ran for reelection, in 1983. In the Wall Street Journal, for instance, Jane Mayer (who is now at The New Yorker) reported that Sanders began a speech at a fundraiser for the United Way by saying, ‘I don’t believe in charities.’ (He later explained by pointing at the donors: ‘Most of them were conservative Republicans busy cutting services to low-income people. Then they go collect nickels and dimes, mostly from working people, and congratulate each other on their generosity. I find that hypocritical.’) The head of the Burlington United Way told Mayer, ‘His speech was, uh, a little longer than we expected.’ He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, as Vermont’s only congressman. He told Elizabeth Kolbert, then a political reporter for the Times, that there were perks to being the only socialist in Congress. ‘I can’t get punished,’ Sanders said. ‘What are they going to do? Kick me out of the party?’ At the time, the most notable way in which he had bucked the Democratic Party had to do with gun control: Sanders opposed the Brady Bill, which placed regulations on the purchase of handguns, a position that’s come up, lately, now that the press is taking him a bit more seriously. (Sanders said then that he did not believe gun control was a federal matter; more lately, he has said that, as a man who holds a middle ground on the issue, he can broker a compromise. Many critics are unpersuaded.) After serving eight terms in the House, he was elected to the Senate in 2006. He is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress.”

In an appreciation of Finnish author and cartoonist Tove Jansson, Sheila Heti relates the moment when she discovered the power of the line: “One day my mother–who immigrated from Hungary forty years ago–was visiting my apartment. She noticed that on the fridge my boyfriend and I had taped a large picture of Charlie Brown, which we had torn from the pages of The New Yorker. It was just Charlie Brown standing there with his hands at his sides. Upon seeing the picture she stopped and said, ‘What a nice boy! Who is it?’ The remarkable thing wasn’t only discovering that my mother had strangely never encountered Charlie Brown, but that upon seeing him for the first time, she immediately liked him, felt sympathy and tenderness. Until that moment, I had not fully understood the power of comics: I had never witnessed so starkly what a perfect line can summon. A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts. Whatever cynicism I had about how commerce creates familiarity creates conditioned responses creates ‘love,’ it crumbled in that instant. An artist’s love for what they create is what creates love. The first time I encountered Tove Jansson’s Moomin strips, I had the same feeling as my mother: what a nice boy! (Or whatever sort of creature Moomin is–a creature from a tender dream.) There is such vulnerability in his eyebrows, in his little round tummy, in the way he doesn’t have a mouth, in the babyish slope of the bottom of his face. It was strange, then, to learn that Jansson’s first drawing of Moomin was an attempt to draw ‘the ugliest creature imaginable’ after a fight with her brother about Immanuel Kant.”

This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds discusses how Arendt reveals that by having an interest in local issues, people can band together, create shared initiatives, and thereby disclose the promise of action in the Quote of the Week. Henry David Thoreau reflects on how continuous thought helps to create a deep mental path that will shape our lives in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we are pleased to share an image of a personal Arendt library sent along by Natasha Saunders, a student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in this week’s Library feature.

HAC Virtual Reading Group #10 – The Human Conditon: Chapters 27-30

This past Friday, July 10th, the Hannah Arendt Center hosted the tenth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We discussed Chapters 27-30 of The Human Condition.

As a special treat, we have decided to make the recording of this meeting available to all of our Amor Mundi subscribers for the next week. Afterwards, the video will once again be available only to members and virtual reading group participants.

You can access the recording here. If you would like to learn more about our virtual reading group, including how you can become a regular participant and gain access to all of our recordings, please click here.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Zeynep Tufekci takes a critical look at a recent study (by Facebook) showing that the social media’s algorithm reduces the number of “cross-cutting” posts that we see, posts that challenge our political beliefs. In other words, if you’re liberal, Facebook highlights liberal posts, and vice versa for conservatives. It gives the people what they want, or what they think you want. “Here’s the key finding: Facebook researchers conclusively show that Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm decreases ideologically diverse, cross-cutting content people see from their social networks on Facebook by a measurable amount. The researchers report that exposure to diverse content is suppressed by Facebook’s algorithm by 8% for self-identified liberals and by 5% for self-identified conservatives. Or, as Christian Sandvig puts it, ‘the algorithm filters out 1 in 20 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified conservative sees (or 5%) and 1 in 13 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified liberal sees (8%).’ You are seeing fewer news items that you’d disagree with which are shared by your friends because the algorithm is not showing them to you…. Overall, from all aspects, this study confirms that for this slice of politically-engaged sub-population, Facebook’s algorithm is a modest suppressor of diversity of content people see on Facebook, and that newsfeed placement is a profoundly powerful gatekeeper for click-through rates. This, not all the roundabout conversation about people’s choices, is the news.” The censoring of oppositional content is subtle and minor, and yet it persists. All of this means that people with different politics will actually see different posts, making them susceptible to meaningfully different realities.

Business Week asked Paul Ford a simple question: “We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, ‘Can you tell me what code is?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘First of all, I’m not good at the math. I’m a programmer, yes, but I’m an East Coast programmer, not one of these serious platform people from the Bay Area.'” 31,000 words and hours later, you realize Ford is telling the truth but answering like a coder. You can’t read his long essay–interspersed with video explanations and offers to learn basic coding (“We can’t teach you to code, but we can hold your hand through a live-fire exercise. It will be dry, because code is dry until it ‘clicks,’ and often even then. Want to give it a shot?”) without gaining some insight into the beauty, chaos, complexity, and importance of answering the unanswerable question. “A computer is a clock with benefits. They all work the same, doing second-grade math, one step at a time: Tick, take a number and put it in box one. Tick, take another number, put it in box two. Tick, operate (an operation might be addition or subtraction) on those two numbers and put the resulting number in box one. Tick, check if the result is zero, and if it is, go to some other box and follow a new set of instructions. You, using a pen and paper, can do anything a computer can; you just can’t do those things billions of times per second. And those billions of tiny operations add up. They can cause a phone to boop, elevate an elevator, or redirect a missile. That raw speed makes it possible to pull off not one but multiple sleights of hand, card tricks on top of card tricks. Take a bunch of pulses of light reflected from an optical disc, apply some math to unsqueeze them, and copy the resulting pile of expanded impulses into some memory cells–then read from those cells to paint light on the screen. Millions of pulses, 60 times a second. That’s how you make the rubes believe they’re watching a movie…. You can make computers do wonderful things, but you need to understand their limits. They’re not all-powerful, not conscious in the least. They’re fast, but some parts–the processor, the RAM–are faster than others–like the hard drive or the network connection. Making them seem infinite takes a great deal of work from a lot of programmers and a lot of marketers. The turn-of-last-century British artist William Morris once said you can’t have art without resistance in the materials. The computer and its multifarious peripherals are the materials. The code is the art.”

Jennifer Gonnerman’s eulogy for Kalief Browder, a young New Yorker who spent three years in jail without being charged with a crime, is an indictment of the whole criminal justice system and specifically of the cruel and unusual technique of solitary confinement: “He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell. In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable. Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, ‘because it was watching me.'” Ta-Nehisi Coates further contextualizes Browder’s short life in terms of the way the criminal justice system treats African American men.

Josh Marshall wonders at the crazy complexities of Rachel Dolezal’s existence, including the fantastic levels at which she, born white, made up a past and present life for herself as a black woman. Against criticism that she may have claimed blackness only when it suited her or that she embraced blackness to get a job at the NAACP, Marshall writes, “Maybe Dolezal had a separate life as a white person or put herself down as a white on a home loan application. (Obviously whatever her intentions she had the freedom which dark-skinned African-Americans lack to just become white again whenever she wanted.) But that’s not at all the impression I get of this woman by reading her story. I get the impression that in her mind Dolezal actually had at some level become black, possibly even to the level of some aspect of body dysmorphia. (The counter to that perception, though not necessarily invalidating it, is that according to her adopted brother she warned or perhaps even threatened family members not to expose her.)” Her embrace of her blackness even led to hate crimes being committed against her (at least some of which she fabricated). But the basic point that Marshall insists on is that Dolezal is simply a liar living in an increasingly fictional reality: “I read the Rachel Dolezal story before it got picked up by any national outlets in the original story in the Coeur d’Alene Press on Thursday (yes, epic aggregation fail … what can I say I was traveling). If you’ve only read pick-ups or follow-ups, read the original if you get a chance. It’s an amazing piece of reporting and will make you appreciate what a great thing small paper journalism is–just an amazingly detailed piece of shoe-leather reporting. Since I read it I’ve been trying to think what if anything there is to add beyond the peristaltic WTF that seems to be the near universal response. So let me just go with bullet points. Point 1: The one simple thing is the online debate about whether Dolezal is simply ‘transracial’ like Caitlyn Jenner is transgender. No. It’s not like that. In fact, I think we can dispense with this entirely because I have not seen anyone suggesting this anywhere online who wasn’t just some wingnut concern-trolling transgenderism and frankly racial identity itself. You can dress yourself up however you want and identify however you want. But when you start making up black parents and all the rest that went into this story, you’re just lying. Full stop.” Dolezal’s story may raise fascinating questions about race and identity. But let’s remember that making up coherent fantasies that one holds to in the face of facts is dangerous, demonstrating a disdain for reality. To rewrite history, even one’s personal history, diminishes the power of factual truth and habituates one to living in coherent fictions, which Hannah Arendt argues is one of the root causes of totalitarianism.

Anne Fausto-Sterling wonders how we’re supposed to know what’s good for us, especially in light of “new government guidelines released in February” that reverse a long-standing view that cholesterol should be limited. Suddenly, she writes, “It seems I am free to eat eggs, lobster, and oysters without fear for my life. How, in a mere five years, could our ideas about nutrition do such an about-face? There are several possible explanations. First, it may be really hard to do a good study linking cholesterol intake to ill health. Over time scientists may have designed better and better study methods, until, finally, a more justified truth has emerged. Second, vested interests–giant agribusinesses (purveyors of lobster, eggs, and well-larded beef) and pharmaceutical companies (purveyors of cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins)–may have influenced the guidelines. Third, foods have changed. Perhaps newer studies differ from older ones because an egg circa 1960 is not an egg circa 2000. Today’s chickens are more inbred. Their own food intake has changed, possibly altering the cholesterol in their eggs. Fourth, we have started to focus on human metabolism at the level of multi-organ interactions. Instead of treating diabetes as a disease of the pancreas and obesity as a problem of fat storage, we now talk about a metabolic syndrome, which links high blood sugar, high blood pressure, excess midriff fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels to increased risk of heart disease and diabetes. As conceptions of disease change, so do ideas about the sources of disease. And fifth, the tried-and-true ‘all of the above.'”

Zach Pontz considers Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger: “Meursault has divorced himself from history, has, as he tells the investigator tasked with questioning him following his crime, given up analyzing himself. Assigning meaning to the world is something he has lost the energy to do. Harun, on the other hand, is driven by the desire to impose form on a lifetime of quasi-intelligible incidents, the foremost of which is the murder of his brother and its aftermath, which has sentenced its victims–Musa, Harun, their mother–to anonymity. ‘There’s not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward,’ Harun tells his interlocutor. ‘The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance.’ If Meursault is the stranger, Harun’s brother is the invisible man. But the tragedy here is that Harun understands he can’t will his brother into being, that he’s forever been written out of history by Meursault, in whose book ‘The word “Arab” appears twenty-five times but not a single name, not once.’ In this way does Daoud, a popular columnist in Algeria who has become a vocal critic of the government, set up one of his main theses: that both the French colonial system, the French Algerian population of which (known as pied-noirs) populated Algeria for a century and a half, and Algerians themselves are complicit in the country’s current state of affairs.”

Dwight Garner shares the work of Juan Felipe Herrera, the newly appointed US poet laureate: “Mostly, though, you’d like to hear him at the National Mall because his work is built to be spoken aloud. His best poems are polyrhythmic and streaked with a nettling wit. He puts you in mind of something the writer Dagoberto Gilb once said: ‘My favorite ethnic group is smart.’ Witness Mr. Herrera’s long poem, ‘187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (Remix),’ for example. In it, he flies a freak flag, in a manner that resembles a blend of Oscar Zeta Acosta and Allen Ginsberg, on behalf of his determined politics. Among those reasons Mexicanos can’t cross: ‘Because it’s better to be rootless, unconscious & rapeable’; ‘Because the pesticides on our skin are still glowing’; ‘Because pan dulce feels sexual, especially conchas & the elotes’; ‘Because we’ll build a sweat lodge in front of Bank of America’; ‘Because we’re locked into Magical Realism’; and ‘Because Freddy Fender wasn’t Baldemar Huerta’s real name.'”

This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens uses the protests in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD to understand both the differences and the relations between violence and power in the Quote of the Week. Military strategist Carl von Clausewitz discusses the effect that rules and principles have on a thinking man in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate an image of a graduate student’s personal “shelf library” of Arendt in this week’s Library feature.

Why did Benjamin Netanyahu win Israel’s recent elections? Various explanations are currently being put forward, most of which reveal more about those who suggest them than they do the political realities in Israel. To truly understand why Bibi won, we need to listen to what those who voted for him are saying. Continue reading →

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Judith Shulevitz skewers the increasing prevalence of safe spaces on college campuses. She talks of a Brown student who, “alarmed” that a speaker was coming to campus to debate and criticize the term “rape culture,” went to the administration and had them organize a competing lecture affirming rape culture and safe spaces “available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.” “The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments ‘troubling’ or ‘triggering,’ a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and ‘sexual assault peer educator’ who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point, she went to the lecture hall–it was packed–but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. ‘I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,’ Ms. Hall said. Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being ‘bombarded’ by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.” Shulevitz investigates how “the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma” is mobilized by student activists to force university administrators to censor speech and shut down debate. Colleges are not intended to be safe spaces but spaces of tumult and inspiration. It is distressing how universities have rolled over and adopted safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes in an effort to palliate young people who have been misled regarding the strictures of the life of the mind. When Hannah Arendt wrote “there are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous,” she expressed a simple point: Thinking risks destroying and upending your common sense and your most cherished beliefs. All thinking risks negating one’s identity and values. Which is why thinking harbors within itself the danger of nihilism. But the only thing more dangerous than thinking, Arendt insisted, was thoughtlessness. While thoughtlessness may appear safe, its long-term consequences are the uncritical acceptance of ideologies. Only the dangerous and difficult work of thinking, Arendt believed, might be able to prevent the rise of thoughtless horrors like totalitarianism. It is time we made our colleges and universities once again safe for dangerous thoughts.

Amichai Magen has a long and intense account of the dangers posed by the rise of Salafist Jihad to Europe. He insists that we stare the threat in the eye, which means first understanding it. “This violent utopianism inspires Salafist jihadism’s vision of conflict, society, and politics. To their mind, the Ummah (or ‘community of believers’) is in a state of total war with the West, ‘the Jews’, and other non-believers, including apostate Arab regimes and Shia Muslims. This war not only justifies acts of extreme violence against those who have conspired to ‘suppress the true faith’–beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions and rape–but involves the rejection of all forms of man-made law, democracy, and the Westphalian international system. Indeed, Salafist jihadism is contesting the essential values and institutions of modern liberal societies in a manner not experienced by the West since the defeat of Nazism.” Salafism, writes Magen, is an ideology as was Nazism, one that has both the strengths and weaknesses of all ideologies. One weakness of ideological movements is that their members are not psychopaths: “Reducing terrorist motivation involves both short-term deployment of sticks and carrots and deeper, societal counter-radicalisation efforts. Although their values and conduct are abhorrent, terrorists are rarely psychopaths. Most terrorists calculate their action based on the dual logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. Accordingly, the motivation of would-be perpetrators can be greatly reduced where intelligence makes the likelihood of early detection high, the chances of escaping an attack low, legal sanctions against involvement in terrorist activity of any kind tough and, at the same time, the benefits of lawful citizenship and integration into society are visible and attractive. The best way to deal with a terrorist threat is to prevent its emergence or spread. Understanding processes of radicalisation and developing effective de-radicalisation policies ought therefore to be at the heart of European-Israeli dialogue about prevention of Islamist political violence. Studies of Islamic groups in Europe are somewhat encouraging in this area, finding that although young Muslim men in many European communities often feel frustration and humiliation they have to be actively radicalised by others to cross the line into terrorist activity. Contrary to popular myths about spontaneous internet-based radicalisation of lonely and unhinged individuals, the process of radicalisation is almost always a social one. Peer-pressure, systematic indoctrination, separation from general society and repetitive training–which can more readily occur in prisons, secluded religious centres, remote training camps, or in fighting abroad–are typically preconditions for getting vulnerable recruits to cross the line into terrorist activity.”

Sue Halpern wonders after our future in the age of technological unemployment: “There are physical robots like Jibo and the machines that assemble our cars, and there are virtual robots, which are the algorithms that undergird the computers that perform countless daily tasks, from driving those cars, to Google searches, to online banking. Both are avatars of automation, and both are altering the nature of work, taking on not only repetitive physical jobs, but intellectual and heretofore exclusively human ones as well. And while both are defining features of what has been called ‘the second machine age,’ what really distinguishes this moment is the speed at which technology is changing and changing society with it. If the ‘calamity prophets’ are finally right, and this time the machines really will win out, this is why. It’s not just that computers seem to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives, it’s that they have infiltrated them and are infiltrating them with breathless rapidity. It’s not just that life seems to have sped up, it’s that it has. And that speed, and that infiltration, appear to have a life of their own.” Nearly 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that the second most threatening event of the modern age was the “advent of automation.” Automation, she predicted “will empty the factories and liberate man-kind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.” The danger of automation, she argued, was that it threatens to realize a long-held dream of humanity: to free ourselves from labor itself. The problem, in Arendt’s telling, is that we are at the precipice of freeing ourselves from labor at the very moment when we value labor above all else; the old “higher and more meaningful activities”–religion, family, nobility, tradition, public service, and war–for which freedom from labor might be won have been lost. The absence of meaningful life without a job is why the prospect that automation might actually deliver us from labor is so terrifying.

Greg Beato explores the exploding market for edutainment and the “academization of leisure.” “What does it mean when people who can afford to spend their time however they please hunker down in front of their flat screens to watch theoretical physicists or experts on other subjects lecture for hours? Entertainment values have come to dominate many aspects of life, but another trend has been playing out, too. Call it the academization of leisure. It can be found in the live-streaming TED Talks lectures, the Great Courses, learning vacations, podcasts, science centers, brain-training games and retirement communities like Lasell Village in Newton, Mass., whose residents must complete ‘a minimum of 450 hours of learning and fitness activity each calendar year,’ its website says.” Edutainment has long had negative connotations, Beato writes, some of which were described by Neil Postman in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. “In it, [Postman] argued that culture’s primary mode of discourse was shifting from print to TV, and that as a result, ‘politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce’ had all been ‘transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business.'” For Beato, the new paradigm moves beyond mere amusement: “In ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death,’ Mr. Postman lamented that a former Hollywood actor could be president. Now, former presidents are replacing professional entertainers as the top-billed stars on cruise ship vacations. Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, will visit with Smithsonian Journeys participants in Gdansk this summer. César Gaviria, former president of Colombia, will be on hand on a National Geographic Expeditions cruise off South America this fall. While lunching with celebrity politicians on luxury cruises may seem frivolous, what has actually happened is that a purely recreational activity has acquired new intellectual ambition. ‘There’s an increasing demand for meaningful experiences,’ says Lynn Cutter, National Geographic’s executive vice president for travel and licensing. ‘When people have choices on how to spend their money, they’re valuing experiences more than material things.'”

Walter Russell Mead offers some plain analysis of the impact of Benjamin Netanyahu’s win for the future of U.S.-Israeli relations. Netanyahu’s campaign comment that he rejects the two-state solution threatens to “have a chilling effect on U.S.-Israel relations that will outlast President Obama’s time in the White House. It will also deepen Israel’s international isolation and put useful weapons into the eager hands of Israel’s enemies in Europe and elsewhere…. The belief that every people on Planet Earth has the right of self-determination is deeply engrained in American political and moral culture. Historically, supporters of Israel benefitted from this widespread American belief. That conviction cannot be turned on and off; support for the goal of a Palestinian state is a permanent feature of American politics. Americans are, I think, prepared to show some understanding both for the difficulties of Israel’s position and the problems caused by the deep structural issues within the Palestinian movement, but it would be extremely difficult to build a long term U.S.-Israeli relationship on the basis of the rejection of Palestinian national rights. There is a minority of Americans, perhaps on the order of a quarter, whose support for Israel is strong enough (or theologically grounded in certain evangelical readings of Scripture) to embrace an Israel that sets itself openly against the goal of a Palestinian state. Other Americans are so worried about terrorism and radical Islam that they are willing to support Israel no matter what stand the Jewish state takes or doesn’t take on the Palestinian question. But there are enough Americans (and, additionally, enough American Jews) whose support for Jewish self-determination in Israel is linked to support for Palestinian self-determination in a Palestinian state that U.S.-Israeli relations will be significantly and progressively harmed if Israel’s leaders choose to close the door on Palestinian statehood.”

Frank Cottrell Boyce remembers fantasy satirist Terry Pratchett, who died last week after an illness: “We live in a society whose culture is driven by fear of death. We adore youth. We pay for science that extends life rather than enriches it. In his life and in his work, Death–‘not cruel, just terribly terribly good at his job’–was the final and finest target of Pratchett’s satire. In Mort–Pratchett’s most popular novel–Death takes on an apprentice so he can have some time to himself. As he learns to appreciate life, so the apprentice comes to appreciate Death…. This twist is at the heart of Pratchett. In an age of fundamentalisms, he embraced doubt, the possibility that a stupid belief might have something going for it, whereas an obvious and rational truth might get you nowhere. I hope that that is the twist he is enjoying today–that having dismissed all hope of an afterlife, he is sitting on a cloud with Jonathan Swift and Swift is saying: ‘By Jesus, Terry, I wish I’d written Truckers.'”

Rod Dreher worries that we’ve abandoned the humanities because we’ve lost the light: “But I think it’s also true that we as a society have lost the sense that within the study of art, literature, and the humanities, there are things vital to shaping our souls, and to discovering and taking into ourselves what it means to be fully human. That Homer, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Michelangelo, and all these great men saw more deeply into the human experience than almost any other, and came back to tell us what they learned, and to help us see what they saw. In the end, I think it comes down to a deadening of the soul among our people–that is, a sense that there is no need to learn or to experience anything beyond what we desire to learn and experience, because our desires are self-justifying, and do not need cultivation.”

Film Screening, A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and Director’s Discussion by Michael Lessac

Synopsis: A diverse group of South African actors tours the war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia to share their country’s experiment with reconciliation. As they ignite a dialogue among people with raw memories of atrocity, the actors find they must once again confront their homeland’s violent past, and question their own capacity for healing and forgiveness.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Weis Cinema, Campus Center, 6:30 pm

HAC Virtual Reading Group – Session #6

HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Property and Freedom: Is Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty and Promoting Freedom in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and Rift Valley Institute.

Free and open to the public!

Monday, April 6, 2015

Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am – 7:00 pm

The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Location TBA, 6:00 pm

SAVE THE DATE – 2015 FALL CONFERENCE

Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015

The Hannah Arendt Center’s eighth annual fall conference, “Privacy: Why Does It Matter?,” will be held this year onThursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We’ll see you there!

This week on the Blog, Lance Strate discusses how Arendt teaches us about the mutability of privacy in the Quote of the Week. American botanist Luther Burbank provides this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of “The Age of the Democratic Revolution” in our Library feature.

“To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.”

— Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt warns us against two confusions that have the potential to ruin our understanding of politics: the confusion of power and violence, and the confusion of (political) success and (military / armed) victory.

During the weekend of January 10-11, 2015, millions of people gathered in France and across the entire world to demonstrate their rejection of terrorist violence. In their rallies, they were responding to the assassination of cartoonists and journalists of a French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, an iconoclastic weekly that had published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. These demonstrators were also responding to the assassination of the hostages taken in a kosher grocery store by another terrorist claiming his affiliation with militant Islamic jihad. Firmly opposed to the use of armed violence by terrorists, the people of the world united together in silent and nonviolent reflection. On one side, Kalashnikovs; on the other, pencils, paper, and the supportive responses of cartoonists from around the world. On one side, corpses; on the other, a swirling mass united by their rejection of violence. Continue reading →